Joe Ahearn

1. Metaphor

...small grass, more brown than green

       (The world-soul veined with blasted creepers.)

       (Conflation is a song of the heart.)

Bird's notes fall like cigarettes from a box.
And the grackle who chews his song
a dozen feet above the burnt grass
is like the Word rolling back on itself.

2. Image

Birds, clouds, ashes....

       The Mother is stone.
She meets us in the Italian hills.
She will eat us, I say.
The sea and its beauty will be our undoing.

                       --And yet, as always
an image comes: the blackened ark, blackened
sea, the cloud-white Dove...