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Flightless  the bird is a cat. The cat
knows no body of resistance fishing

in a garden pond on a gray day of imperceptible rain
when the water is still cold and the fish are slugs

orange and fat in the flat gray rot of the first thawing
of spring. The cat's body

is not just another kind of bird   but the cat
knows how to do what the bird knows how to do.

I have observed this in the woods behind my house
where there are many cool and predatory birds

unconcerned with the civil life that rages on around them.
Ordinarily the cat does not thrive at this time   its work

having been done by water and law. It has disordered
the world within like some kind of raven and left us

to sit on furniture without skin. The cat and we are ready
to see it out again. That the cat is no body of resistance

knowing full well the irony of death    is clear.
Note the humor it makes of this season.

I have spotted enjoyment in the eyes of a cat.

At night you are an olive tree
the possibility of branches

stretching to sun. I reach around
warmth as if it were outside me, you might be cork

or cotton where you grow. What is desired
by this language of limbs

that we be a stillness of heat, dark
until only our seeing.

And the eye’s concealment becomes our lover
and by the silence we formed with our voices we hear

He did not know where he was when he became aware of himself, speaking to a middle aged man with a graying beard. He did not know his own name, nor anything about his life, but he did not feel confused. He had a sense of himself, the way he perceived, how he felt toward what appeared.

It was hard to understand what the bearded man was saying. They were standing in a large alcove, beneath an overhang of rock. It was dusk. Other people were standing there too, in a rough circle. The speaking man was a builder of some kind, and he was speaking about people from someplace nearby, people who had been in an accident, but the particulars of his language were difficult to decipher. Nobody seemed to take notice of this. It appeared that all of them standing there understood each other's emotional gestures and paid no mind to the words exchanged.

Mist in the morning. Over days
the sun strikes ice.

Teeth creep down windows.
The vines begin to leak in

one drop at one time. The sound,
the touch of ice, the touching of ice.

Someone has been walking a distant to and fro
scraping shovel against snow.

A hawk is dark over winter ground.
A man shatters through the overgrowth.

Between watchers, the trees of limbs bend.

When wasn’t rain, if I am not fooled
when was? So the rain cannot be seen

nor does it rain outside me, nor does it rain
inside me, if there is raining seen. It is thus

but no it rains, no thus for an it to be. Steady
in darkness soundless sound of rain wet

that is to hear without hearing heard
or simply speaking now as rain becoming