"Dear Mr. Director of the Census Bureau, yesterday hundreds
of broad wing Hawks moved in kettles over Eastern Travis
County, dropping shadows on scaly pines and glass fault
drives, power lines and watering holes,
sailing in currents of rise and fall, heavenly, purgatorial.
This morning, at the Spider House Cafe,
a manager strings white lights through rungs of Jasmine.
At a table near mine, a girl sits
with her mother and boyfriend.
The girl pulls handfuls of bread from a plastic bag.
'Tell us the story of the night she was born,' the boy asks.
A cement mixer grinds across the street.
On a sidewalk, a woman struggles with a sack of laundry.
'I was playing Risk,' the girl's mother explains,
'and they were letting me win.'
Dante described the universe as a series
of spheres and heavens--
sphere of air and fire, heaven of moon and Venus,
heaven of fixed stars, angelic circles,
the rows of the blessed.
My mother hung curtains on the morning of my birth.
My father untangled strands of tinsel.
Capricorn ascended.
I could chart all the satellites danging
like a mobile above my nursery.
Hawks alight on a high voltage tower
by the highway, each scrub oak below them opens like a flower,
each city block unfolds like a square on a game board.
This morning, I can see the staggering boundaries
of power grids and aquifers.
But sir, they tell me nothing.
Sphere of the chain link fence around a daycare center, heaven
of police cars pulling up to the curb, heaven of winter
treetops barren and brittle.
Rows of the boy in a paper hat running towards the crosswalk.