Lenny DellaRocca

Bird Café

There was a dusty bird finished with everything,
evening stirred in the trees
and the figs were never consumed.

Above the noise of conversation
at the sidewalk restaurant,
I overheard a man say something

about the Café Verona. I wondered
why my ear tuned to just his words
in the miscellaneous air,

why my eye sought out that bird
sleeping among elms and wrens
as if nothing on earth mattered.

These were equations to me,
physical realities
caught by chance in nonlinear

verbatim by the formula
which sends art out among chaos
and finds a place for itself.

As if all possibilities had been
ruled out
except that bird

and a voice saying Café Verona.
There was, and could not be,
anything else in the world.

Lenny DellaRocca has poems here at 2River and in Nimrod, Sun Dog and elsewhere. His book, Alphabetical Disorder, is available at Amazon.com. contact • website