Where the branches of the honey locust thronged through daylight hours
with wings and voices of bluejays finches cardinals chickadees and
white-throated sparrows making their spring-loaded hunger-sweetened
presence clearly known—now near midnight under a clouded sky a solitary
raccoon’s plump shape with swingeing tail is a solid squat shadow aloft
there on a bare bough a dark body sunk it seems in monkish meditation
an almost otherworldly visitor keeping in stillness his own counsel
and receiving through every ready hair and wiry nerve along each vein
and into each quiver of every electric ventricle our shared earth’s vibrations.