Winged Time

The first hummingbird of the day (David Chorlton artwork)

Three-twenty-one in dove time.
The moon has turned its white face
toward infinity. The sunlight
is restless with a slow breeze pushing
it from where it tries to land.
A short way down the street

the house for sale is lonely
without so much as a smile to occupy
its rooms, although the mockingbirds
outside it sing

their isn’t it peaceful here song.
The sidewalk shines its afternoon
shine, a ninety degree No Man’s Land
occupied only by grackles

pulling their calls out of the sky
to warn the silence they are keeping up
their vigil over what
surrounds them. The hummingbirds
are clocks whose hands never stop.
Four-thirty-eight has reached

the mountain ridge, and flows down
to the lantana universe where
each second blooms
into nectar.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of the desert zone in the Southwest, a landscape he is very attached to. Before Arizona he lived in England and Austria, and he has finally seen publication of a book decades in the making: The Long White Glove from New Meridian Arts. Nothing to do with poetry, rather a true crime story from 1960s Vienna. Read other articles by David.