qarrtsiluni

Can it be the wings are first to rot?
Why now this surprise when for twenty springs
you turn a familiar corner, never finding
in the shadow of the stop sign a fallen angel,
its soft but gritty carcass?

Though it’s been a hard winter,
it must have been a massacre up top.
The dead in such great numbers
you’ve witnessed out windows of planes,
yet they were all lined up, ghosts reclining
in vague coffins, feather-white and buoyant
on a backdrop of purgatorial blue—
unlike the heap in the gravel lot across the street
that suggests forms never human,

though there’s no comfort
even in the torsos of demon creatures,
let alone a mound like an albino sea lion
you earlier stumbled upon at home, tucked
along the foundation, out of the sun, out of sight.

by Karl Elder

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