Waking in the Year of the Boar
BY BRIAN TIERNEY
Those feathers in the bushes were not left by angels—
those smokestacks blowing, trying to be light, say believe
or be lost. And clouds move over just-hammered nails.
Who are we to live forever? Along I-80, goats graze,
testing the fences, not knowing there’s no heaven—
& grosbeaks going South, to the Carolina basins, rest
in palm-crowns older than churches: they do not care
they may vanish in the Atlantic. My father is dead—
by my foot, an ant on his way to the hole, a sibling
on his back, follows instinct down to dark: how we
miss what is gone, simply because it’s gone. And a drift
of leaves hides the buried from their names, & there are
dead hives in the river with no fear of night, & it is
quiet on 18th Street, in the year of the boar & the verb
“to be.” A voice saying: sleep—we are less important than bees.
