Flight

Now all I hear is my own hum
so turn again to the window where
a broken line of parked cars dots
the whitening sidewalk, as the sun
englobes the street in crisp detail
and vivifies the skeletal oaks
that scratch against the sky, implying
the chimes of birds about to arrive.
I lean against my window, note
the dust motes pillowed on the glass
like a moleculed yawn, so grab a rag
and spot, on the ledge, two piebald pigeons
strutting and pulsing back and forth
as they peck along the sill in sync.
I leave the dusting for when they’ve flown
so their coo-coos can continue uncuffed.
The milkiness of sidewalks spikes
to a well’s mirror of sheerest white.
The street’s arcade of windows sinks
into blank eye sockets. Panes of glass
are framed trembles of liquid quiet.
I know that much of life occurs
in private, yet these pastel faces
of Charles Village row homes where I rent
embody hope for what’s well-built.
Above the crown of turreted roofs,
an elongating streak of an airplane’s cloud
extends over us a cupid’s arrow.
Up there, blue spans in twin directions
with stony light that stretches toward
two ever-afters. At vision’s limit
where facts wink questions, where the sky
is cracked across by farthest roof tips—
there in the guess—the plane’s white wake
untangles and flakes to traceless wisps
and then succumbs to origin.

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G. H. Mosson is the author of four books and chapbooks of poetry, including Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line, 2019), and coauthor of the forthcoming Simultaneous Revolutions (PM Press, 2021). His poetry and literary commentary have appeared in The Evening Street Review, Measure, The Tampa Review, Smartish Pace, Free State Review, Rattle, and The Cincinnati Review, and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. He has a BA in English from Portland State University and an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where he was a teaching fellow and lecturer. An attorney since 2012 he enjoys raising his children, hiking, and reading.

[image: Piebald Pigeon | Citron-Vert]