Two Poems
Words By Joseph Hutchison
Another Sky
Frigid wind
shivers one
tattered wing
of a car-struck
magpie dead
on the road. Now
her gibbous moon
breast lights up
another sky,
her eye’s black
opal that night’s
only star.
The Raven’s Wing
A black flash, a streak
outside the
sliding glass door, startled your
glance into
dwindling twilight. The raven
vanished into it,
left you with the sun slipping
into hiding beyond
some distant
peaks, dyeing high clouds,
turning lakes
from silver glints to flat flecks
of tin. Night
mists up from the thickening
pine forest now, melts
into that vaster darkness
that all day had arched
overhead
(shrouded by the spring
day’s blinding
brilliance); Venus glimmers forth
among faint
spatterings of stars, and low
above a deckle-
edged ridge, the quarter moon tilts
its milk-glass horns. Then
suddenly
you’re here—here in this
shadow-rich
room, recalling how that black
wing found you
lost in feckless fantasy—
a daydream of how
much fuller your life
could be, if only you had
more money.