Patricia Staton lives in Astoria, Oregon, where she and her husband, watercolorist Noel Thomas, build aged miniature structures for collectors and museums, and teach their techniques at workshops around the country. Her first collection, “The Woman Who Cries Speaks,” was published in New Poets, Short Books Vol. II, by Lost Horse Press in 2008. 

Staton says: "Except for the birds’ wings, there was no wind to speak of."

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Airport

by Patricia Staton  

Of our own free will, we watch each other

watch CNN fill the big screen:

an empty shoe,

the scene of another suicide bombing,

but remote, as if it were just a shoe,

not some war or other.

The air buzzes with light.

I have been unable to shake the man on 8^th Street,

a wreck of a man

bearing a scar the color of poppies,

dancing, beery, bumming change,

singing for us some thread of a song, some essence

remembered as beautiful. It is sadness

that weights the very air we breathe.

Spilling, like light, out of the beams,

the improbable trees, in flocks,

a flutter of something

akin to sparrows, or chickadees,

begging for alms. For the moment

we are wreathed in birds.