Proportional

[71degrees]

too much of a gimmick?

Like a guttural street mongrel,
I am half Irish, one quarter German,
one quarter Swedish, a frac/
tion may be Luxembourg; mother
told me Granny visited there once
before the turn of her century

In the primary grades we are taught frac/
tions: step on a crack, break my mother's back
her two halves like two kinds of luck;
we always walked on dark streets
just in case

There are seconds, minutes, hours,
even years; all these small moments-
drop by drop, are filled with frac/
tions; how we spend them is the hum
of secrets never shared

The fragments of poems: words,
lines, images, the murder of crows
when they lift to ease into other trees
to break the hoary silence of winter,
branches black thick on white, frac/
tions of life; it takes all the time left
in the world just to catch our breath