LEAP DAY BIRTHDAY
Today, a bright one in February,
sun made it down almost the whole way
into the courtyard. Knucklebones of tiny trees.
Arc of shadow on brick and glass
as something enormous comes near, and
decides to withdraw, peering out of the
vertiginous blue, as it does sometimes.
No, the off-years are better,
the feeling something’s special, different, but the clue only
no worry that it means anything
that it will be solved, going from prologue
to epilogue all at once, a better marker this
absence, this instant of midnight which ingests
a day’s vanishing, this invisible hummingbird,
which alights on my life for an instant and is gone.
Author’s Bio
ADAM SCHEFFLER grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently working on finishing his PhD in English at Harvard. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Colorado Review and many other journals.