Scale and Feather

Nicholas Yingling

No one dies, dear reader,
not in this poem. And I hope—
though there is much talk in poetry
about not knowing—no one dies
in the next either. Until then,
best to concern ourselves
with smaller questions: why
the wind weighs a half bottle of wine,
sometimes red, sometimes white,
or what forgiveness has to do
with these shadows of lepidoptera
blotting out Los Angeles.
Try and ignore for a minute
any arrhythmia like a day-moon
lingering in your chest and I’ll try
to forget my 3.3 isn’t passing
for a white blood cell count.
There’s a cost for looking inward.
Two pennies for the carny
with his marvelous new radiograph.
How to write a line: radius-graph.
Lepidoptera is a scale made of wings
but I’m not sure I have anything
so light to weigh. Not yet.
Sometimes the heron flies over,
all feather and joint, and the koi
are fine. The day balances
like a mug on your knee. Yes,
you planted the wrong milkweed
last year, whatever that means,
but still the monarchs came.