Riddle

The snow lifts into the beards of sycamores.
Laura says with some nervousness
that the tracks over the snow
are divisible only by their sum and zero.

An owl, leaving its cedar bough, laughs. I laugh.

She breaks a stick, says that a brazen mathematics
of stars in the illustrated night
is signaling its approval to us.

I say, “Oh, really, and which stars are these,
precisely?”

Childlike, with a sigh, she points and whispers,
“That little blue one, in Orion,
just beyond the stomach
of the hunter and his trapezium.
What do you think, how many wars
in our new millennium will reach
their natural conclusions, and blink?”

Copyright © 2004 Norman Dubie All rights reserved
from Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission