Managing Myth

From time to time the red-winged blackbirds tumble
on the rainy air just above the shopping center
parking lot. Turning the car wheels
to just the right angle at just the luckiest moment,
braking often, sometimes I think that mostly
the small-and-fluttering will survive, and the beautiful-
through-darkness: heart, flag, koan; elephant, embargo, ennui.

I like to think that thirty-some years of grieving
had an archetypal meaning, as the Pleiades,
lost forever running from a hunter, are symbols
of an innocence not quite forgotten. How the girls
scurried and scattered through the woods, how they must have
cried, and beat their arms and leaped into the trees,
and from there . . . . The siblings disappeared almost completely,
became a dule of tiny flickers in the sky.

Watching the errant red-wings, recalling my own
heavy-headed past, I like to think that I
am not just a child of folklore and dark circumstance,
that there's a way to be smaller and still bright.

Copyright © 2004 C. J. Sage All rights reserved
from Folio
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission