Trying to find my roost  Â
one lidded, late afternoon,  Â
the consolation of color  Â
worked up like neediness,  Â
like craving chocolate,  Â
I’m at Art Institute favorites:Â Â Â
Velasquez’s “Servant,”  Â
her bashful attention fixed  Â
to place things just right,  Â
Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,”  Â
whose fishy fingers seem  Â
never to do a day’s work,  Â
the great stone lions outside  Â
monumentally pissed  Â
by jumbo wreaths and ribbons  Â
municipal good cheer  Â
yoked around their heads.  Â
Mealy mist. Furred air.  Â
I walk north across  Â
the river, Christmas lights  Â
crushed on skyscraper glass,  Â
bling stringing Michigan Ave.,  Â
sunlight’s last-gasp sighing  Â
through the artless fog.  Â
Vague fatigued promise hangs  Â
in the low darkened sky  Â
when bunched scrawny starlings
rattle up from trees,  Â
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing  Â
the bare wintering branches,  Â
black-on-black shining,  Â
and I’m in a moment  Â
more like a fore-moment:Â Â Â
from the sidewalk, watching them  Â
poised without purpose,  Â
I feel lifted inside the common  Â
hazards and orders of things  Â
when from their stillness,  Â
the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds  Â
erupt again, clap, elated weather-
making wing-clouds changing,  Â
smithereened back and forth,  Â
now already gone to follow  Â
the river’s running course.
