Lee Passarella AUGURY As I drive to work, two vultures sit on the shoulder of the road picking through trash, solemn and unruffled as bag ladies, the gray drapery of their feathers tented over their humped asses like outsized raincoats. I want them to be dreadful: slag-gray wings spreading to the very corners of the frame my car window makes out of this scene on the icy verges of an old man’s bleared Thanksgiving— invalid wife sicker still today, sinuses rotten with infection; my hangover lifting its gray scrim above the mediocrity of a job suffered only by degrees: Oil spill. Melanoma. Soul’s eclipse. But there they sit, wings folded back into two brief hunches at the shoulder. No grim majesty anywhere to be seen. Bodies sketchy, shapeless—huge barnyard hens with heads the gravelly white of decayed snow melting down into rumpled wattles. Omens not of death but worse. Of life. Copyright © 2005 by Lee Passarella. All rights reserved.