A shrug of limbs: gambrel symmetry: a hallway of parkway trees arch filling green middle of May thick: maple, elm, oak.
But the ash borer and the city crews: whole blocks reduced to sap splinter chips.
The crows black on the grey stain on the branches at a distance yammer warn toss syllables: two beats, three beats four beats raw as friction across the parking lot.
Like felt cut outs, like stencils like watercolor bleeding they’re larger than when they land in backyard trees or on nearby light poles.
I drive: sleet pepper windshield blindness.
All the waterdrop lens distorted houses look made of clapboard granite: all the wet pavement hisses.
Grey canopy sunset sky rises like fifty starlings writing a telephone wire to tree top text with their black wing snaps.
Perfume of minerals and must: drizzle streetlamps: light in rice grains of tarmac sparkle:
a distraction of rusted wool sky.
I stoplight hesitate.
Apologies to the birds like stitching: apologies to the loneliness of afternoon for staring: how the sun can’t break through in more than angled shafts of dust and water stain smudge.
Apologies to the man in the car behind me who braking heavy stops and lays on his horn like an obscenity.
We are all looking for the accidents of beauty: the shatter scattered plastic when one thing and another hit.
John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit and december magazine. His full-length manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.
