At Phoenix Park the winter rains have failed again, 
and vernal pools lie drained. Weak February storms 
filled up the shallow swales with silver shivers; 
now a yellow tide of mustard blooms 
wild and improbable, as if the planet couldn’t keep 
good news from breaking through the bad. 

Sinking waters left amoeba-shaped borders 
pushing back the grassy hillocks, and the breeze 
makes all the fresh bright frilly painted edge-blooms 
tremble like cilia. All seems forgiven 
in this odd and tender spring— the drought, 
our economic skittishness, the winter wars 
men make on one another overseas. Even 
the acts of murderers, who summon names of god 
to justify their slaughter, and then call their crimes 
policy. And wipe out all who balk. 

A thousand soldiers here, civilians without count—
another of life’s offshoots, things as they are, 
the universal pattern. Right along with change of light 
and the seas’ inexorable rise. Survivors weep 
and suffer in their grief, growing 
to reconcile the inconceivable. 

Meanwhile in live-oak groves of Phoenix Park, 
formal-suited magpies strut, pointing sleek blue tails 
like weather vanes toward the ground, 
reminding us who watch (who could forget?) 
of where we’ll make our last retreats. 

They cackle and they mutter, casting wise eyes 
through lazy lyric tales of nesting-life 
high in the oak limbs, where the eyes of men 
have no right, and no dominion.