your whole naked chest and penis.
When you peed high into the air
the room was all clarity and dazzle,
as though it were the simplest thing.
Alan Shapiro
TURKEY
VULTURES
Always at evening they glide in, thirty or more,
like a gathering night chaff high over the woods
behind the house, with their long wings barely swaying,
banking as they wheel over us till one by one they loop down
into the crabbed maze of the same (always the same)
tall
oaks, where the wings now suddenly flared
rustle heavily against the branches as they settle.
Hard not to think of them as waiting, they are so still–
bunched three or four together still as moss, black moss
in
the crook of branches, and others alone out at the ends
like fruit weighing them down. It is hard not to think
the grey gauze of the trees behind them, reddish leaf mould
and pale fungus on the ground, and even the house itself-
porch, wood frame , sills and floors - are darkened by them,
quickened with their dark, and that soon they will be
the single watching of the night perched all around us
as we go from room to room, to draw the curtains,
seeing the same wing flutter up and hover
over every light that flickers to go on.
