Saturday Walking

Noah Leznoff
From:   Why We Go To Zoos. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997.

Walking the street
covered in simplicity like air
like rain-thick wind humming
and no nothing tired,
but a road moved healthily under me
and the wind made a sail of my shirt.

Balancing eyelids and dances, my fingertips
and fireflies, I watched the sunrise crash
against the continent — everything heaved;

I stretched my skin from sleep fetching
sticks for a stray dog.
It was that clear morning accumulation,

morning for leaving margins with blue veins
for receding houses and bric-a-brac,
for feet becoming heartbeats.

When a roadside redness gathered me in,
mistook my silence for its echo, the rooster
grasses for the wind blowing them warm,

I knelt to gravel and a stone lisped: listen.
And overhead, a thousand geese came honking; the sky
was a marble table, blue and grey; the clouds, women
playing in the white lake of the sun.

And lying lost on a path the dog and I watched
a yellowjacket glitter til its crying
died; and to that tremulous leaf that blew by
our nostrils spread like strange fish fanning,
and our tongues dug bowls in the earth
to mark where it fell and moved from.

What supped in my lungs, I wonder, when we stood inside my
mouth? It grew so cold and blue, made me throw my arms to
pinwheels, made me wrap my mountain skin in clover and dust,
and when I shivered out of my sleeve, shaking in the grass
like wind, and when the pond-lip suckled me like a leech,
a clean-licking fruit — that's when groundwater
broke, and our bodies shattered

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Noah Leznoff's works copyright © to the author.