#dore kiesselbach

[recycledsoul]

Ornament

The Christmas tree comes down but isn't dead yet, doesn't drain the quart a day it did the week I sawed it from its future in the earth, but still sips, last cells stubborn in a local life. Losing needles all the way, I haul it bottom first through the dining room, leaving marks beside marks I left last year and years before, yank yank yank it out the kitchen door. I don't believe in Santa but I can't take it to the curb— it brought us together in honest wonder on the couch. To leave it upright in a drift between dangling suet and the surveyed line I tow it through the yard by limbs where varnished feathers shined.

--Dore Kiesselbach

[lacartaajena]

Turkey Fallen Dead from Tree

Startled from snow-day slumber by a neighbor’s mutt,

it banged its buzzard’s head then couldn’t solve

the problem of the white pine’s limbs

with wings nearly too broad for a planned descent.

Somewhere an awkward angel knows

whether it was dead before it hit the ground.

Any sinner could tell it was dead after—

eyes unseen beneath bare and wrinkled lids,

feet drawn up almost as high as hands.

I loved to watch thistle and millet

disappear beneath it in the yard.

As snow covers feathers that will still be

iridescent in the spring I remember seeing

a businessman take a dripping handful

of pocket change and throw it down

a subway grate beside a homeless man.

The coins bounced and clattered, vanishing

in the humid dark. The rich man said

now you’re having a shitty day too.

But it’s not a shitty day and won’t be

when I retrieve the bird and walk it—

toes curling stiff from a shopping bag—

to a houseless scrap of oak savannah

birdseed drew it from and dig it

into deeper snow so what was hoarded

by a man may by the thaw be doled.

  --Dore Kiesselbach

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