On Omens
       

Today, the sky is boiling.

Hear me out. It is heated from something down here.

The clouds are fulminating and branching in skeins of wire.

They are pricked by needles of heat rising off a paved world.

It is June, and already the garden is a failure.

Plants spindle under the wan light,

stalks blight and waver down to the hairs of their roots.

I would try to tell you how it feels to be your captive,

but there's something hatching in my throat,

clouding my words, eating my cells.

We think we are safe.

On my birthday, when ice coated the telephone wires

and juncos pecked millet from the snow,

in the light from the neighbor's porch,

I saw two coyotes cross the yard in dark silhouette.

They sniffed the ground for cats

then disappeared beyond the hedge.

1 tried to see them as an omen.

They weren't an omen.

They were too hungry for that.

Tweet
Copyright © 2012 Mark Wunderlich All rights reserved
from Green Mountains Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission