The Voice
It’s a voice only I understand and then not always. It isn’t the voice that you recognize as mine over the phone and that you hear say, “Love you,” before hanging up. It’s another kind of voice. Secretive. It speaks the dialect of ghosts. It speaks continuously but you can’t hear it. Only I can hear it. It’s of the same joyless substance as my thoughts, inseparable from them, as a night’s dreams are inseparable from sleep. I have no choice; I must listen. The voice tells me I’m me, I exist, like the rumble of crowds or the brilliant darkness of blackbirds and crows.
Feed the Poor
It’s just simple sugar water that I mix up myself, but it attracts plenty of hummingbirds to the feeder. While conspicuously colored ones can be found down South and out West, these appear brown, almost black, maybe to match the gloom of Northeastern woods. They also have a kind of frantic energy, their wings a mad blur, beating 53 times per second, 3,180 times per minute. I could sit for hours and watch them zip about, seemingly impervious to the gravity that enchains us. And sometimes, not often, if the light falls right, their dull chest feathers assume for an instant the otherworldly emerald glow of a fool’s idea of heaven.
Wow. Absolutely beautiful