Michele Karas

In the road a smear of black and white and poppy-red. Has the sky dropped a handkerchief? How easy it is, I think, to slip a thing so exquisite from a fixed place and care so little as not to retrieve it.

It troubles me enough to circle back. When I approach the torn corner of silk, it does not startle to reanimate.

Nor, when I kneel to scoop it up, does the bundle of bone and feather—no heavier than a garlic bulb— cease its cooling in my palm. The tiny mechanisms that are his talons ringlet around an invisible high wire, inducing vertigo, and suddenly I too am tumbling flightless in a hailstorm. If the earth is a magnet, so is everything in it— all of us resisting, and failing to resist, the pull of each other or something else. Tell me, what leaves with the Living when the Living change form?