Myth of Arrival

Of what I will miss the most – wings. Graceful
fits a winged boy on a high rock above
fields and towns; taking only a handful
of what is. The hedge sparrow and street dove
are a narrow valley; their movements all
benign. Finches cannot trust in olive
orchards and doves, mid-summer grass. Rainfall
for the finch is – here I recall – a love
of a world gone green, gold, black; embodied
words in a fluid tree rich with speed. Within
faith that is all that is. Let the finches
mock this bullfinch-legged boy, any crossbreed
between bent wing is a demon. As in:
someone who can take exactly what is.

I live across the street from the Fulton Street Cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Over the weekend we had an ice storm and by Sunday the whole neighborhood was wreathed in fog. My parents came to visit that day and I asked my father to take a couple of photos of me in the mist.

The grounds of the cemetery are about three acres (four city blocks), roughly. Both Byron Root Pierce and Stephen Gardner Champlin, Civil War heroes, are buried here. As my neighbor put it, in the summer, "it's a good place to take a book and get away from city life."