Marie Higgins

Winter sheets strap the writer to the window,
Predawn, a Rorschach sky –

Unhinged, white, puff-packed clouds,
Edges unstable, celeritous and projecting,
Against a fading blackboard,
Speckled with flecked stardust

Diagnostic moon peeks opportunistically,
Watches for clues, stares;
Antlers bounce over razor-round hooves,
Kleck-klecking across concrete and shadows

Nearby, a blaring spotlight works to blot the many,
Bare, gnarly branches on some bricks,
Whilst a jingly-collared schizophrenic hound
Makes a pair of fox personalities split
From the predawn light

Closeted on a hill near the pond,
you stand in a uniform line with
relatives, extending your breezy arms to
pull on my scent while I shade.

I lay beneath you,
peering up at bare strips previously
made under a rutting moon.

You woo me with your glamorous
garment changes.
You have a pullover me.

Under autumn skies your getup,
magically costumed in morphing silk until
you are not wearing a stitch,
varied decay of threads around you,
dyes wearing thin.

I stomp on them to reach your body,
clinging as the larvae and lichen do.
It looks strange to passersby.
I don’t care.

I bid farewell, for soon,
a thick white blanket will swaddle you,
your perches an icy array.
When this happens, I cannot stay.
By design, I am limited.

The local honey laces my smoothie,
creates a thought:
I wonder which flowers I am tasting?

So much happens outside my window,
time and space of the occurrences a mystery –
imagination fills in the spaces.

Back in the yard, bees now buzz
Autumn Joys, for the poplar’s
tulips already left their sky garden –
they pepper the perennial beds.

That squirrel with the white back patch
doesn’t scavenge under the feeder anymore;
A tasty morsel for the red tail, perhaps?

I prefer to think it on vacation.

The smell of ham bone soup
turns me away from the window.

The vegetables are from the sun garden.
Did the rabbits watch me harvest them?

Much happens inside these windows, too.

I step to the busy chef to curl my arms
around him, like newly sliced parmesan,
hearing a tasting slurp as I do.

Rain might get the best glimpse
as they drip over the window glass –
Do they feel the vibrations and wonder,
‘Is that the piano or laughter?’

Or does the imagination fill in the spaces?

Three jays in the lower sash,
One in ten, two in nine,
Cry like hawks, readily push fear,
But not through the glass;

Tail of squirrel in eight, torso in four,
Missing its head as squirrels go,
Until the head comes around
When the oak permits two-way traffic –

Downward four-to-eight-to-twelve-to-sixteen,
Like a losing team, before its teammates release
The tree blossoms for stealing, seconds splitting
Into minutes, until the Mourning Dove rests on seven,

At Dogwood Square, where a house finch slides
From second to third and beak-first brothers
Parachute down, below grilles thirteen through sixteen,
Sparrow in five, four, three, two, one, gone.

Prayerful fence-post meetings
Of the little sinless trespassers

Strawberries spied and thieved
Whilst the Waiters wait

Perfect pepper plants
Slip-tied like martyrs to poles

While celestial vines
Explode inside cages

Tiny bright beloved yellow
Blooms becoming

Untainted green orbs
Filling to glow red-like until

Tomato trios cling aerially
Like mobiles over babies

Nearby butternut blooms burst
Before

The surprise takes
When the gardener arrives

Dappled yellow and green
Novitiates will begin

A pious pose
In veneration of the sun

Until beveled pinstripes hug
Hippy buttery frames

On the gardener also
Bending to collect earth’s offertory

The beans make the preordained
Climb righteously up the metal trellis

Where catbirds rest and revere
The sacred sequence