Two Poems: How Many Nests of What & Word

Ellen Doré Watson

How Many Nests of What

In a net of light against the buggy dusk,
squinting at my neighbor's just-hayed field,

hot whir still in my ears from the sickle bar
that wiped out how many nests of what, or

nearly? The wind--lately just a whisper-
brush on cymbals--rises fierce. Like Richter

with his I-beam, it scrapes a wide stain
across the fast-fading sky. A gift of pigment

to close a black-white day run through
by a late taste of blood. The article

I'm reading in seeming womb-light says
happiness is historically related to morality.

Stop to wonder whether happiness is instead
simply present or (zap!) gone--maple sap

by late April alive only in its sweet bottled
form--but morality? Whose? Maybe

it's something stupid simple as: give without
get. Extrapolate! And, get this, my thesaurus

says the opposite of happiness and virtue is
guilt--better known as internal bleeding--

which swivels me to the innocents: velour
of mouse or bird beast--and could one still

be heaving out in the close yonder? I eat flesh
and can't blame the farmer. Or my human dead,

forever bringing up my failings. Though maybe
they're forever changing like the sky in my eyes.


Word

Nightsmell of sweet-aged wood, and curtains
are a breathing. Wet palm of wave gentle-slaps
thighsand. Not like yesterday's brutal. The ribs
of the room with their generous. Resting places.
I understand where charity comes from, but clarity?
(No no-see-ums here in the white float of almost
sleep.) Looking for a word, I've stepped into a boat.
I want eager. Pray me. Astonishment. I'm courting
this best of abstractions. It says: Look at the fish.