Spring Creek
       

Standing at ease in the current,
watching my thoughts stream by,
seventeen thousand thoughts in a day.
If I grasp one the river stops flowing.

Those horses on the walls of the Chauvet cave,
twenty thousand years before the pharaohs—
unsurpassed and thoroughly modern—
before Homer, Heraclitus, or Pollock.

Do we think of pigeons as lowly
because they crowd our trees and the empty spring sky?
I saw one torn apart by a hawk—one bird—
and at that moment I grieved.

My grief is here with my joy now,
wingtip to talon, they circle,
one closer at first, then the other.

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Copyright © 2018 Dan Gerber All rights reserved
from Particles
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission