THESE DAYS

Here at the local Starbucks you
sit in the college outskirts, wind
ruffling your papers, sky so deep
you're falling, all these ideas
chick-scratched in notebooks, ink-stained
napkins nested in your journal,
blue smoke from Russian dilettantes,
Polish lovers mooning over
the linguistic patterns of starlings
and coffee, Indian physicists
sipping caramel macchiatos,
arguing flights of particle theory
poetics and super colliders,
while scruff-feathered sparrows
beg for cake crumbs. The birds perch
beside a child standing on a
plastic chair, teetering, barely
able to speak, the wind blowing
hair in her lips, her Turkish mother
smoking, studying the season,
the girl picks up her mother's
flip phone and studies its black
odalesque screen as if it's some
talisman to another world:
she licks the screen with her tiny
pink tongue, giggles, puts it to
her ear, "Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!"
while her mother smokes in silence.
The phone clatters to the cement.
Birds scatter like the host.
The wind from their wings
pushes hair off her eyes.
Swaying in the tiger lilies
behind her, she's your wild aesthete,
your soul, your restlessness,
waiting to be loved.