The Littlest Amen

                                                                               in serendipity, with Tanya

That’s a “winter” wind (hah), and that sky
flutes ashen shadow, dissonance

like glissando, soft and hushing
a true cold’s name: Lake Effect. Hoar

Frost. Black Ice. Because it won’t snow,
not here, this Old South in my beyond midlife

where foraging birds syncopate all these little
cantata clouds scoring, I dunno, caesura,

and the wind sounds off more as a boastful
cadenza, grace notes winged with a reverence of

such warmth, everywhere; great beauty,
beauty everywhere; everywhere faith. Hope. Still

I just want to go home. My home.

Yeah, yeah, I rose-color memories, and they thrill
sanguinity through me,

my lachrymose me, the sentimental
sap of me, all gooey. Except that’s, of course,

a cardinal, and there, those’re starling, that
a Carolina wren, none your basic

messenger bird, yet who with their trill deliver me
the littlest amen, a something like a sigh.

Ray Marsocci presently lives between place and work, continuing to construct book manuscripts while getting paid to perform behavioural-health jobs, living where he grew up, in Rhode Island, while trying move back to where he feels is his home, Vermont. His work has appeared in such places as Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, and La Fusta, as well as in the online zines The Smoking Poet and Carcinogenic Poetry.