Not a Sail

It’s caught high, a clear plastic ghost

against the grey stretch of sky, a maple

bare-limbed, rattling in the cold.

Not a sail, though it flaps with such

conviction, a frantic, empty signal.

It’s a grocery bag, the kind you forget

in the cart, then find it, later, crumpled.

Now it’s up there, a cheap flag of surrender

or a trapped, thin bird that just keeps

flapping, tearing itself on bark.

I watched it for too long. It offered

no freedom, no lightness. Just garbage

doing what garbage does, getting snagged,

insisting on its broken presence,

making the winter trees uglier.