Daniel David Moses, poems (2)

Ballad from a Burned-Out House

Fire always wanted to marry Stone.
She claimed he alone could anchor her.
She travelled through the wood with her hair
loose and lifting almost to the sky.

Stone never dreamed he'd meet such beauty.
The heat of her kisses startled him.
Though he wished to be diamond and quartz,
his body quickly thickened and broke.

Fire shrouded herself in smoke and rain;
Stone covered his dark wounds wiht new grass.
Of course, they had no children or pain.
Theirs was a cool and perfect divorce.

- - -

Crow Out Early

The only one who speaks to this long rain
is that crow sitting on a pole like old
Raven, spitting out caws in pairs. He got
out of dreams on this wrong side of the bay.

Over there a foghorn makes a four-note
effort Crow can't comprehend. It's not like
even the loadest moans of his friends who
keep asleep, their effor to ignore how

this pressing fall of clouds has made a pine
the only place to settle. This makes Crow
with folded wings a black and glistening
pair of hands and his cries, a quick prayer, reach

out through the fog. His eyes get a shimmer
and his ears a song, both like the run off
gurgling at road edge. He ses the stones there
washing strong bodies egg bright, beetle slick.

- - -