Telltale Signs

The Telltale Signs

You murmur the omens
in a leopard's ear, too tired
to know of sanity, too careless to care
of notions and rumors spoken in the dark.

You murmur the telltale signs never told,
always known: always the swans
examining their reflections in the lake;
always your bronze-gowned maid absorbed

with her face in your parlor mirror; the lords
whose promenade relents, suspended
like solstice in June, like the porcelain vases
in windows, eyes

tethered on their Japanese appearance.
Say you murmur 'all of this' until the waters
are as dark as the evening,
until the waters are as dark as the leopard.

II.

Say a course of sendal
wavers behind you then off you, hovering
over fields lying fallow where trees
drip tangerines.

Arcadia

Why not start with the man and the snow
confettiing the lawn, and how light glows;

why not start with footfalls or the bumble
bee with wings too thin for its hairy body

not heavy, but slick with honeysuckle splutter;
why not start with the sun that swells,

unswells, in a rainbow’s wet transparency;
or the fog we see as thinner,

more transparent – unraveling till
it seems dappled in blue in good light;

why not start with the boughs that droop
fraught with fruit; or the seven magnolias

in the yard, breathing out. Why not end
with what coats the shallow body

beside the magnolias; or the beaver - that
slammer - slapping its tail on water.