Poem (To Wes)

If the traffic is flowing the crow must be flying.
Me, Tivelo, and Beau are happy in the window
sketching bare buttocks and hair dripping with
the voices of the trees goading a bird to sing.
Here an ampler air clothes the grass
where children play

And you there, how does thee? Muddy? and his dog?
The old black crow on his spredden wings, the old gray
sky? In the colonnade strike up the melody now
with fingers and now, over again with the loaded brush

Yet bestowing a little to endow our little left
turns with the strange --
and of all vigils’ music which proclaims the near, the clear
its loose meaning mournful and simple like your panhandler’s
music.  The broken guitar
it now leans propped in the old vertigo against the carved oak
monk’s chair.