Mosquito

The garden at night coy shadow,

fishpond thick with softly

gleaming algae.

The human whispers, our murmured

secret thrives in such balmy

chiaroscuro and we have so

much to share—but we

are not alone. The insistent,

stubborn needles, yes,

no, approach and flee, their

whine more distracting than any song.

The wounds they leave are nagging

constellations across the map

we wear within our clothes,

as the hunters easily know here we have

hidden in the windless angle of the dark.

The hand slaps, misses, kills, what does

it matter? They are legion,

and what they steal is hungrily

pilfered survival.

We slap again,

shake our heads, wave our hands, too much,

soon we will escape.

But stay, almost forgiving—we have

so much to learn about

each other and these hungry

wings pause only to persist,

missing, stealing with a

blue-note mine-mine all the while

nothing is theirs.

The Giraffe

Let the trees

root and grow.

Let the feeding birds choose this

shade or that branch.

When the learned accept

that the lessons are worn out,

only the wide horizon is left,

and a life shaped by such

magnitude is changed,

elevated in a way

that can only be awkward.

To be handsome, he realizes,

accepting this

clumsy grandeur, to be a

creature of proportion,

is hopeless. And so he feeds

from the crests of the woodland,

follows a shadow ungainly but fluid,

over the watering hole,

through the increasingly scattered salt lick,

over the tracks of lesser, quicker beings,

their dimunutive elegance exhausted

by escape from the predators

that only the extraordinary can see,

and only the silent ungainly,

resigned to his stature, free of hope,

can drive from the helpless.