Or of the rain itself, laughing, and coming, and going.

The cupids’ bellies are swollen like the bellies of pregnant

Women or small overbred dogs fed on delicacies. What

Offspring will they bear?—these boys, who torment a lion

In a cloud of lilacs, his single wing struck off near the tip,

And the day now at its center, uncertain of its purpose,

And the pond at its blackest, no bigger than a skirt

Fanned out on the grass, and the small grave caged

Near the pond all pock-marked and shining. Lilacs the color

Of rain, and rain the color of plucked flowers scattering,

Or coins falling on the dirt, and at the base of the lion

A dead sparrow lying open and held in silence as if in a palm,

The bird’s feathers easing the skin, the stone lion marking

For a moment the small bird’s grave, though the lion

Is no gravestone but the graveyard’s guardian, and the rain

Is the sparrow’s consort. And now the dead sparrow’s

Brother sticks its head in the mouth of the lion, a test

Of courage, beating the boys at their own game, and the name

On the caged grave comes clear, James Herod. King,

Was he, tetrarch, a sparrow like the rest....To the north,

Red sumac shoots rise up like herds of antlered deer,

Or like fences of iron spikes, and near the entrance

A rope, swinging in the wind, hangs from an oak, as a child

Once swung in the wind, grieving for her father, a grief

So pure it still holds the day on its course....Shadowy applause

For the lion. The child singing in the wind. The child

Unclothed. The tarnished silver vines looking dead

Though they are not. Always they break into blossom

And grief....Shadowy applause for the sparrow and the lion.

IV

The Sparrow’s Gate

And the bird shot through, who, had the stone arms been intact,

would have dashed his small brains out and fallen like a bloody

cloth to the grass—

the bird shot through—

and the absence, the missing arms beneath the beautiful slope of the

woman’s shoulders, her perpetual at ease, the woman not

requiring as the man might the order to relax—

the absence, beneath the beautiful birthright of the woman’s

shoulders, the domes of mosques, or snowy hills, cold

abundant hills,

though now all is hot, the air is hot, the grass is hot, the sweet

stench of stewed greens rising like the savor god feeds on, such

a lot of flesh to make a pleasing smell, bull flesh, and lamb

flesh, and dove flesh, all the steaming pools of blood and flies,

but that was long ago, as the heavy-breasted body, mulled in

sweat and patience that gave birth beneath the scuptor’s hands

to her giant twin above, stood long ago, a thousand plus a

thousand years or more;