written on a blank page above a sticker nametag: Hello My name is May

 


At Chesterwood


 

written on a blank page above a sticker nametag: Hello My name is May

  

Birds doing their bird living

in between leaves & twigs & the fallen-

 

in- their- beak- seed or a breathing thing

briefly wriggling.  Their diamond maws

 

are broad across their entire face then break

the jaw of their nest-mate to make it through

 

their almost fledged month with this

old brood.  It’s a bird eat bird world

 

out there.  Clutch it.  Clutch this brief

unsteady living.  This getting on

 

with things.  & OH! the sky they’ll gain

for the passing of it! How one minute

 

there’s a half a katydid in their throat

& the next they’re cold, their others

 

flown, this twiggy home’s poking

their breastbone, & all the while this

 

moment folds to this moment folds to

this moment—so, clearly, naturally, no?

 

So.  To be this.  Briefly. (after being,

                        briefly, not so)

 

alone before the going,

wherever the hell the others go toward

 

their bird feet claws holding

holding, holding ---------------------

 

                                                            then,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Last year’s hydrangeas, see how

Image
Last year’s hydrangeas, see how               they sit yet with their full heads                and measure themselves against             these February melancholies             together with their self-             preservations to absorb nothing             of winter and its required               privations. See how they still cling to their own twig and branch and root,             their moss and sod, how they rely             on the falling away     ...
Read more

The Sentry As Witness

Image
  The Sentry As Witness   three days the moon will be full   again and in the night   while we sleep while we turn   when we can’t sleep an owl will ride   the never stopping thermal across   the moon’s face and be just   a shape – just a shadow   briefly obliterating   the light that’s cast the path   of a stray rabbit   stunned stiff in being   seen.  it makes me want to say this entirely out of context: not all marriages not all childbirths   not all wild night embraces are meant   to be anything else but or beyond the brief   mouth on mouth, claw penetrating skin,    the situation peeled back   in the bright path breaching   the white under- belly now draped   in the patient maple is an opportunistic   claw tipped now in the vicious    verm...
Read more

Day Haul

Image
  Of Day Hauls                         for Joseph, my student, sophomore, Lubec, Maine   It’s a pier only punts and dinghies can moor to at the slack tide watch its flat as glass rise and decline                                     wide into the parting lips of the bay cliffs be drawn down that channeled throat and out to the Atlantic. Here a magic waxing moon hauls on each wave, see how days the table of the pier deck is categoric each eye socket rub a soft clink rise and rub fall along the pier piling.  Days the deck is a gang- way ramp on the ebb watch the men in December in February ready their rigging and motor out and tie off their punt at the buoy the gear glistening in the moony ice. ...
Read more