Tag: birds

At MSP Arrivals Door 3 on Christmas Day 2019

A woman stands near the curb
with her back to me, cloaked
head-to-toe in her chador,
a black robe held closed from within,
beside a luggage cart festooned
with silver and red mylar balloons.

She spreads her arms
and becomes a great black bird
like the Black-Hawks I saw
perched atop saguaros in Sonora,
wings spread to gather in sunlight,
on a frosty morning in January 1995.

And the balloons hover over her
like her imagined dream plumage,
like the flag of her disposition
to quote Whitman from Song of Myself,
like the external projection
of her red and beating heart.

 

Of the Impossibility of Becoming a Swift…

Of the Impossibility of Becoming a Swift
is also the title of a poem
I have yet to write
but today it would be easier to write
After the Long Summer of Our Discontent
except for the fact
that I already wrote it ten years ago
(see also: Einstein’s Definition of Insanity)
much as I conceived to write
a book of poems titled
Love and Other Calamities
only to discover
Rilke already wrote
Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties
which caused me to wonder
among other things
about what’s lost in translation
and whether he named himself in the title
or if that happened posthumously
which leads to the inevitable question
of will they read me after I’ve died,
and yet, here in the present tense,
I am imagining myself
among the most aerial of birds
with wings swept back like a boomerang
but a man might as well
try to become a god.

Reading this poem tonight at an open mic

After the Long Summer (of Our Discontent)

Turkey vulture, buzzard, carrion-eater,
a dark tension soaring on dihedral wings

tipped with light primary feathers like
fingers reaching apart, stretching beyond

what’s possible, taut to nearly splitting.
Linked eyelashes blinking in the sun,

tracing spirals on blue-sky thermals
above the golden mapled ridgeline,

one, two, four, fifteen vultures now
circling not to a kill but to a change

of season, each blackness marked
by a featherless head, purple-red

liked an open mouth, a ravening beak
to pick clean the carnal landscape.

The tension is not life and death,
it is that tautness that keeps us

circling miraculously on thin air
like a love poem, like the tenuous

and ethereal mystery of you and me.
No poem, my love, can fly carrying

the weight of cliché vultures massing on
an upswelling wind like death angels.

Look again, watch them glide
with the flick of a feather, see the way

love floats away, just out of reach.
Then came the storm, after a hot,

dry season, a torrent upon the dust.
You could tell me not to say parched land,

not to talk of tempestuousness after
the  long summer of our discontent,

but listen to the argument of hot and cold
resolved in sudden winds and sky tears.

8-minute Workshop First Draft

The Osprey

Watching the osprey soaring on warm air
spiraling above the Wenatchee River
near its confluence with the Columbia,

my heart is aloft, hot-blood energy pulsing
to my fingertips. I feel the sudden swoop
and dive in the hollow of my gut

and the slap at the water’s opaque surface
in my aching knees. We gather ourselves
and fly on, not yet satisfied, still seeking

the big fish that got away.

Spring Has Come Early (to the footbridge over the stream above the beaver pond)

Spring has come early
to the footbridge
over the stream
above the beaver pond

and the smart money
is on the crane pair
returning to the meadow
before the equinox.

We always wish for
early spring in March
and early winter in November,
craving what we miss,

sun or snow. If only
we could take each day
as it comes, as dogs do,
as we assume the cranes do,

but who’s to say they don’t
dream of northern meadows
when they tire of their winter
homes? I imagine they long

to trace the flyways
back to their nesting grounds
and those long and lazy days,
gigging frogs and raising their colts.

(Even this poem feels incomplete,
leaves me wanting to see more,
like a blue sky reflected in the
clear and icy water of the stream.)

spring

Watching for Bald Eagles

I dreamed of finding dead birds —
the hens we lost last summer,
and our favorite rooster —
perfectly preserved in the snow
I was shoveling off the driveway.

I proceeded with caution,
more archaeologist than gravedigger,
uncertain of what lay beneath
each drifted form, probing
the outlines of the proximate future
in each measured spadeful.

Then I asked you what to do
with the newly uncovered fowl
but when I could not hear your response
I shouted, “I can’t hear you
when you turn away from me,”
and immediately felt so sorry
for raising my voice unnecessarily

that I woke up suddenly
and thought of all I had to do
with so many bodies to rebury,
so much blood and bone and feather.

I am on the road away from you,
watching for bald eagles.

Hawks in Winter

What sort of hawks are these,
brown and white, on fence posts
in central Wisconsin in January?

There is so much I don’t know.
Do you think they eat mice, or small birds?
Why don’t they overwinter in Illinois?

Or follow the Mississippi south
past Memphis, Vicksburg, the Delta,
to some bayou rich with crayfish?

What do you think they’d make of you,
North-Hawk, those birds of the South,
would they call you Cousin, Mon Ami?

Now 37 straight winters I have endured
since the one I passed in Mexico and
I don’t know if I could stand even one more.

A Murder of Crows

A murder of crows stirs
in the tree that is my heart.

Morning light warms black feathers
and then they take flight,

dark premonitions scattering
on the day’s errant winds.

Words spill like autumn leaves.
Snakes bask in the heat

of the compost pile.
Crows are ubiquitous,

they can stand the cold.
I know they’ll come home

to roost on bare limbs in a tree
gaunt as a saint in winter.