Cardinals in a Shower at Union Square

At first they direct the eye like any other birds upon gun line from the underbrush, in like manner someone calls them sparrows and someone who thinks he knows, scarlet tanagers or something other exotic, as if they've slipped captivityone of those white canopy of heaven August days the hammer of the heat picks on the outside the old one or the child fasteninged in a car, while gathered above the blank grave of the pavement, at the altitude of snow, enough rain to almost forgive it all. single two are really red, the ease a buoyant rust blood brown young or female, all of them with masks and tufts that make them what they are, explosions from the other side or puffed up in, with the paper, with the storm. Whoever starts the clapping is answered by dint of a show of hands to befitting baptismal waters and a pair who are high, bird-dancing. Whoever starts the shouting is quieted by the agency of the lady who hears silences, cupping her clownish ears. For a moment the ringing air is clean, then for a trice nothing happens, nothing moves reject the cardinals, in and without of trees. And in that twinkling ends. The cloudburst passes, the air revolves into fire again, the sirens sing their distances, the walls of light reduce to ashes down. And in no time, in the time it takes the runoff to drain back subterranean there's no one left on the other hand lifers and the dealers and rain birds swallowed upward by means of the sun, and rain, novel rain, in the rivers and the reservoir uptown, ready to rise and to pour its heart without all over.

Stanley Plumly teaches at the University of Maryland. These piece of poetrys are from a forthcoming collection entitled The Marriage In the Tree to be published by means of Ecco Press

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Sep/Oct 1996

Provided through ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved