Cormorants

I could have sensed it coming.

From some distance off I watched as cormorants dropped
between cold rocks,

possibilities resolving into possibility resolved into
a choice.

For a time sleep from your eyes

lent to sandstone what waterfalls had lived. A gargoyle
pulsated his stone wings

in the updraft, warmed by flight. Lightning had opened up
the silver-black expanse

of our souls, matchstick houses made tinderbox
flames.

Home, commitment, togetherness,

ideas clumped together in the char. Orbiting the emptiness
a moon the color of split wood recalled

St. John’s Passion. Morning mists rose in strange voices, raven-
woven into a sheer, gorgeous madness

where everything grounded ceded ground to apparition in bursts
of faint black feather dazing down—

just as quickly it was over.

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of three chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), and Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020).