Field Songs

Aleatory sky: the low cumulus as plumped
and still as if posing for a matte painting, fat
gray doves of low clouds feathered against
the dry-brushed scrim of pewter altostratus.

These bits of poems rattle around my skull like
loose change; my fingers pick up their copper
penny tang as I scratch for a pen, an unopened
bill or scrap of receipt to jot them down, hold
them still. It’s as random as a coin toss, this way,
mutable as the weather and as surprising as
that grasshopper that hitched a ride with me.

What is my work here, then? Which me does this,
sitting in the interstices of a working day as quietly
as a hunter in a blind? The shutters of sensory
attention tripping open or closed: a signal in,
then out, and the polyphonic voices riffing on
rhythms I can’t hear unless I stop: field songs.