Poet's Choice

back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs

we would descend much later;

in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters

where streets were taken one by one,

where consciousness is a stair or path,

we mark their domains with notched sticks

of hickory or chestnut or ash

because our cities of princely pallor

should not have unmarked graves.

Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge

to which patterned being is parallel:

they came as if from the margins

of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning

our little hourglass up on the screen.

In the final lines, the birds' hearts evoke our own computer screens' whirling hourglasses. History implodes to make past and future equally alive. Time stops. There's alchemy in these words.

"Partita for Sparrows" is from "Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries," edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath , 2008).

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."