Angie Estes

EXTRAVAGANT VAGRANT

                                    Someone's been writing on the sky again

this morning, while the moon keeps trying to hide

                                    behind an oak tree even though

in January the limbs are bare

                                    like the steep hillside near the village

 of Conques, where sheep softly drop

                                    lambs. In Antarctica, the icebergs

are calving. It must be apropos

                                    of something, unless it's Atropos herself

with her scissors: so easy to confuse

                                    word and world because words

burrow, sometimes borrow, as if they could

                                    bring sorrow, tomorrow, or whatever

 moves American eels, after dwelling for years

                                    in the fresh waters of the Upper Delaware

 river, to wait for a new moon 

                                    and then in darkness begin

 their months-long migration to spawn

                                     and die in the place they were

 born. But to be a new moon, of course, is to be

                                     no moon: like the one that scientists plan

 to send up in the city of Chengdu, China:

                                     an artificial moon programmed

 to constantly follow Chengdu and its

                                     sixteen million inhabitants and illuminate

 its streets and squares by reflecting sunlight

                                     at night—much like our memory

 of the dead. They are seated

                                     in the shade. Come out. They are

 several centuries apart in time. They think

                                   they see the good old sun:

one takes a gold piece

                                    and talks to it quietly.

ANGIE ESTES has eight books of poems including Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City and The Swallows Come Out: Selected Poems 1995-2025. Awards for her poetry include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and essays devoted to her work appear in The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry.