WRITTEN

Joshua McKinney

                                    a snail this morning 
                                                ascending the pumpkin, 
                                                            does not need me

                                                                         to come into being
                                                           this other
                                              element that shines 

                                 something out of sight
                                              my friend, (for our use 
                                                           only) all creation is

                                                                     vanishing script, what 
                                                                                  was it or was it 
                                                                                                writing it was 

                                                                                                 writing, I saw my own 	
                                                                                     child’s eye shine 
			                                               from the surface of Sugar Creek 

				                                                   where water turned
					                                                        over slickrock my first 
						                                                         invertebrate book

ALLURE 

A hawk is hidden,
                         conspicuously and most high 
            upon a lamp post, 
red-shouldered 
                          as with blood bedight. 

                          In the day’s exhausted
              light, its swivel-headed, arrow-
keen and earthward gaze 
              surveys the evening 
              gold grown over the rush 
                          hour crush of cars, where

locked in traffic, I break,
                          creep forward, break, 
             until—some nameless
progress fulfilled—I pass
at last, useless and low,
             beneath that huge disdain

and feel some puling
                          part of me flushed forth 
             from the sheltering
roadside ditchgrass, skeltering
                            and blind, to be
                           seized in the talons
               of that terrible sight. 

               Inviolable good has drawn 
my busted eyes into 
                           the mirror of my passing, 
              where plume-sheen 
dazzles in last-light, 
             and my ravening, 
                         parched heart leaps 

                         upon the air.