SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
An eagle egg fell into a farmer’s chicken shed
and when it hatched the farmer gave it chicken feed
even though he was the king of birds. The farmer
clipped the eaglet’s princely beak and raised him
This is a prayer for the dead and dying -
and those that may never know a life on the outside
I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave -
this is the growing of things birthing of skin
and bone stem and leaf this is planet
earth beneath snowlight and desert sand
I have so many now.
There’s one where we were giants, playing with our size by falling over
houses and trees, laughing.
There’s another where I was racing the old ones in a game, and we stopped
That night, I opened your wardrobe and found
a trophy of vultures, their necks pierced
by hanger hooks. I saw at once
that you hunted everything I loved —
The meteorologists are pleading with us
to keep checking back through the storm,
ice pellets making a carpet two, three inches thick,
this pale beach we walk on, this wind that passed
Weekends too my father roofed poor neighborhoods,
at prices only his back could carry
into profit. In the name of labor’s
virtue—or was it another bill collector’s callous
i thought you were gone / stupid bird / darling worms shifting in the mud / this time i am not so certain / is it kinship or are you gloating? / have i grown bitter with the bees / how they bring the blooms reliably?
To Windrim or sycamore
rustle cicada or bark and to Wayne
Let Us Be Fireflies
All day we
practice morse code signals
We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a
generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then
stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval
(Falteringly)
Our national bird – for years – was – as A M Klein said –
the rocking chair
I don’t know what our national bird is now – but my totem bird is
Our mother gave us a sack of weed killer
the size of a toddler, and told us
to spread it on the front lawn.
My sister and I lugged it there.
A light cloud of white powder
Weeds are flattened beneath last year’s tire tracks
others lay burden by the winter’s heavy snow.
The crocuses labor through this thick blanket.
I am sun drained from the bleakness
Bismillah is my first memory.
I became a bird in the Qur’an
at hardly eight years old.
I opened the dark green cover
and revealed the slippery
There was busy air there, air
seething through the leaves so,
from farther up, the tree-line shone
like a single scintillating polyhedron.
Still, though ravens and wrens flaked off the top,
The young sun’s greeting
On my bed, your letter’s glow
All the sounds that burst from morning
Blackbirds’ brassy calls, jingle of gonoleks
Your smile on the grass, on the radiant dew.
Slim, slight. Sinew and bird bones.
Cords of her hands like spruce roots.
Came from Ship Cove to Crow Gulch
with little more than the child inside her,
landed in a small shack flanked by
He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear
on sun-fermented garbage.
Hungover and queasy and riled up by
bees.
Nothing going well today, he moans,
life being short and the craft, ah, long.
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
The 31st day of August 1914
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little car
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Hello from inside
the albatross
with a windproof lighter
The place, the question, the question.
The place, the interest, the question.
There is the place.
There is what you do in the place.
There is your belief.
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June.
180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil
…
Who is this black coat and tie?
Christian severity etched in the lines
he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man
who believes in work and mission. See
how he rises from the red velvet chair,
Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother
to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,
beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
Where is the word I want?
Groping
in the thicket,
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
It was down that road he brought me, still
in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,
but it did feel expected. The way you…
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
dont worry yr eyes
dont worry yr brain man th snow is
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”
“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour…
I lift the Lord on high,
Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see
The small birds of the forest lingering by
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you’ve taken to supply,
