Nightingales

Yes I know what it’s from, and so do you,
when after some bird makes a sound outside
you speak of drowsy numbness, and I shoo
the thought away and claim the thing that cried

is day’s lark, warming up to travel far.
So carve your chicken, talk to someone else;
our words are getting friendly at the bar,
our legs are making finite parallels…

And is it strange, this cluttered way of talking?
I’ve always been a sucker for the charms
of influence, benigner form of stalking.
So many clothes you’d think us free from harms!

But layers bring a fine heat, not a numbing.
Now pass the wine and keep the good lines coming.

– Rachel Wetzsteon

Scaffolds

Specter-robed, the ribs of P.S. 1 sway, or seem to sway, under green gauze.
Where the restoration’s done,
workmen strip the planks and scaffolding
from spotless brick.

For months (how many now I can’t recall),
the building settled into its late age, swaddled in this dingy pall,
till no one could imagine what it looked like
when it was young

and clean, or even weathered and unclean.
Clean again, at least in part, it shines in midwinter sunlight’s gleam
like another kind of ghost, the kind that, Lazarus-like,

kicks up his heels to be back in his skin,
or, because skin’s hard to inhabit, is glad at least to have survived a season
in that darkened realm the old arrive at, where the slate is cleared.

– David Yezzi