I. HIGHS AND LOWS

The moon, the sun
The bad men, the good men,
The indifferent and the August stars that bridge
Their gravity
All Sleep
In this abandoned hour

But I -
I sit and love the pewter sky
(Beneath the flyers' shifting cathedral with dome uncapped
Indivisible space
As grave-courtesy demanded)
Love her for the red and stillborn dawn
She might
Still bear in arms of mutinous cloud
To me, a pigeon, a church bell clamoring

While all the dreaming world
Held hostage, naked in a crowd, taking tea with the deceased
Who oddly enough resist decomposition
Transfixed in reveries and night terrors
That no deadbolt hindered even,
Lies at my feet unclaimed
The city of no man (no moon!) no star in August pining for a darker sky
And sleeps a little more

Car alarms wail in the night
Like cattle whiffing the stock yard
The gold china dries on the tile
Like old women on the beach
In great white hats
I flash devestated smiles
For everyone -
As good to me as Confederate dollars
My hands waft lemon joy
And I wait in ambush
For the ghosts of a haunted girlhood
Winding older
Dreaming alternate lives like
an exile from an unseen country
Awake to the night like children are
In contemplation of a dark star-peppered cold
Having never made that uneasy peace

When I lived on 38th Street, in the Burleith neighborhood of Georgetown, my quiet street butted up against an overgrown park. A squirrel scolded me on my way to my 8:45 class - the same one -- and I always knew which one it was. That's because this squirrel wasn't a mottled grey or a brassy red, it was jet black, with a white little tuft at the end of its question-mark tail.

I had never seen a black squirrel before I become a DC transplant. I spotted my first one as it scampered across Copley Lawn on a bright September afternoon. I thought I was losing my mind, but there it was, clear as day and dark as midnight, surveying the lawn with its marble eyes for scraps of dropped food. After that first one, I started to see black squirrels everywhere. I was fascinated. I started asking other students where they came from.