A Raven Returns to the Salton Sea

by Jeffrey Alfier 
  
Travertine Point, Santa Rosa Mountains

Your flight runs the girth of human fables
scrawled dark on some Medieval palette.
One tale even swears when God fixed the sun
to burn in the incompressible night,
the ravens saw Icarus in His thoughts.

Now you skim this raw and un-fabled wind.
Welcome back. You may resume surveillance
over hawks you hope leave you the road-kills.
Maybe you'll relieve a wren of its wings,
its bantam shadow now clutching the earth.


© 2008 by Jeffrey Alfier. All rights reserved.
Jeffrey Alfier recently received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize. His recent credits include Blue Earth Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Saint Ann's Review. He is author of a chapbook, Strangers within the Gate (2005). He occasionally works as a drayman and a thresher.