Call them dark companions, doppelgangers, moods,

A flutter of something I can’t hope to grasp, far away

Things, a city, a star, whose own wide wings interrupt

Its own light, a variation suggesting, well, we are back

To those dark companions, those dopplegangers, those

Moods. And there, perched above them, a kingfisher,

A dark star herself, not fifty yards of flickering above,

Seeing through the glitter to me as a minnow. Yesterday

On some anniversary near and dear to me, I felt as if

I was looking through thin ice, a place where you skate

Along at great risk, where you see ghost shapes in the

Greeny-gray glaze below your history, some might

Well describe as a panorama, but experienced as a

Single poignancy, a discrepancy probably not to ever

Be resolved… but I hate to say never, hate to say a

Downy feather is like dear hair to stand back and see

Less than before. I know they have thumbs and fingers,

The birds variously interrupting the planets, the cities

Whose ribs open to the twin tricksters, day and night.

And I know any minute now a thrasher standing on 

The frozen birdbath will try drinking the gauzy bird

I am beneath it. And I will not resist, how could I?

…

G. E. Schwartz, lives in Upstate New York (Wenrohronon lands), and is the author of Only Others Are (LEGIBLE PRESS), THINKING IN TONGUES (Hank’s Loose Gravel Press), Odd Fish (Argotist Press), Murmurations (Foothills Press), and The Very Light We Reach for (LEGIBLE PRESS), & work in The Brooklyn Rail, Alaska Review, Ghost City, & Fracture, among others, and he’s in the band The Solomons… recordings at Bandcamp.