Sparrows: For Gerald Stern.

Mcgrath, Campbell

 Mexican sparrows picking at seeds is it, seeds of some
black-thorned grass? Or do they eat the dust itself, white grit blown
oft the desert to scrub the cobbles copper-blue underfoot? Cactus
hedges, some yellow vine I don't know the word for in this town,
this tongue, stone walls overgrown with purple bougainvillaea like a
college of prelates wearing strange, multi-pointed hats, or tiny box
kites above some miniscule town where even smaller kids play hooky and
baseball in abandoned fields and crash their kites in scrubby trees and
do not feel regret. Gratitude for that, for not storing a world of loss
in their small hearts. Gratitude for the past which rolls like smoke
from the old river-front mills and gratitude that it is the past, that
it is gone and I am warm in the shade of this grape arbor, snapped from
my revery like an aloe stem. For stones and petals, gratitude, for
tongues, for thorny grass beloved of goats, for industrial rivers, for
baseballs, for bunches of grapes, for the balm of the aloe, for the
vigilant sparrows and the dust they live on.