For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
–Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules

This is not
a love poem.
Sirens
sound outside
my downtown window:
another broken
heart.

Street lights burn
into mid-February
dark, remember Indian
summer afternoons.
The sirens stop.
In the silence leftover,
your pulse, slowed.

Hope hides
breathing low & fast between
the river and the
dying with its secrets
freckled
into the skin
of bare city shoulders.

A soldier
makes his way
uphill from Main
Street station, red
blossoms
stark
against desert camo.

There is no
snow, today.
A good day
for wing-ed
homecomings,
if one hungers
for such things.