World Without End
11/23/15 
Timothy Ree
Literature from Wheaton College (IL) and an M.Div. from Yale University. His poems have appeared in
St. Katherine Review, Peregrine Literary Journal of Amherst Writers & Artists, Palimpsest: Yale Literary &
Arts Magazine, and Prospect: Yale Divinity School Literary Journal. Most recently, he has been selected
for the 2015 Emerging Poets Fellowship, a residency at Poets House in Manhattan.
Leaves outside
- sound of someone leaving
with little argument.
Two, three birds
rapacious - as in the sound
of the word.
Now silence
- the noun sharp, aggressive.
Crescendo
of leaves now like someone
returning -
then leaving again.
A car somewhere warning
another, then
a prolonged warning.
A city bus
and its brakes. A far siren.
Even farther, the engine of a plane.
Someone
in the apartment above
moving a chair
- its wheels grind
the wooden
floor - as sound triggers
the brain - dark synapse
of a forest in which I am lost all
afternoon, listening
no longer
to the leaf-crush rhythm
of my own footsteps
but
for someone, anyone
who might utter my name.
To receive the world
as a blind man on a corner
with cup extended -
in his cup
coins - the plural enabling
the sound.
Anyone, listening now
to the words
rustle, mew, meddle
- what are they really, wrestling
in shrubs?
Sound
of my own hair
on the pillow while shifting
my head.
Quarrel
of three, four birds... when
will you all drop off?
Where your little graves?
Will you go, one
after another
as widows are known
to go?
It happens
that one may simply vanish
For another
the world without end
reflected in a window.
A third?
Someone remembering
her dead father.
I am the fourth, perched, listening
in bed