Call

The boys have learned to whistle.
They ride their bicycles
up and down Elam, straight
from Fernwood to Fortune
and back, their piercing
notes signalling the others:
sunburned, scrape-kneed, eyes
narrowed as they scout the neighborhood.

How did they learn? Not from fathers,
absent or exhausted. Indian tales
are as out of fashion as feathers,
leathercraft, Fenimore Cooper,
yet they ride like Comanche,
pumping their bikes
and then standing on the pedals,
arms sunward, note answering single note.

Even dead center of the city, after all,
the cicadas crawl out of their skins
and leave them, small lamps, on the maple trunks.
Possums gorge on ungathered pears,
and the sharp-shinned hawk,
fashioned for woods-work, banks
between power lines and porch
to take a sparrow in mid-whistle.

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