My Despair

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man  --e.e. cummings

I spoke to my despair

in a voice that October

wears around its injured throat

on a chain of dripping water.

Because the nights are too long,

I sew their darkness into a jacket

and on the sleeves are

embroidered golden snakes.

I sit at a table made of the world

with legs of heirloom iron and wind.

Young men run past, shouting

and dragging morning to her grave.

In evening, I speak to the cardinal

who comes to my window like a Gypsy.

I say, the dawn is still in love with you

but a snake strikes the cardinal

from my sleeves

and my despair.

______________

for Dverse Poetics "Reflections" The image by Andrew Ridley and the quote by e.e. cummings are required. 

Don't forget that Word Garden Word List remains active through Saturday. 

Bird Watching

 

grackle, expounding

A cowbird and grackle were in disagreement

over a definition of terms.

Astride a dead sparrow, its small breast pierced,

the grackle explained this action

in terms of disbursement of seeds. 

The cowbird objected, arguing that the grackle

was a cheat, ending a life

already in progress and pointed to the ashen sparrow,

non-renewable, lying still

as a stone and twice as useless. 

Don't get holy with me cowbird, scoffed the grackle.

You're nothing but a flim-flam bird

and a deadbeat parent, letting the other raise your brood

by knocking the originals

out of the nest like so many shucked hulls.

Murderer! they both cried, each to the other with scorn.

The grackle strutted about,

proud and righteous, while the cowbird sang the faux

river in its throat,

that beautiful false flow from which none may drink.

I saw all this from my window, an avian stage play

with knives and subterfuge.

All day until dusk I turned over the problem of who

was in the right, but was interrupted

by a million starlings screaming for either, or both,

or just to hear their own voices in cacophony as the

weary sun gave up the yard to shadows and moonlight.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Richard Wilbur.  

The cowbird leaves its eggs in other birds' nests; the hatchlings shove the parent bird's eggs out and run the parent ragged feeding the cowbird chicks who are often much larger than the bird's own chicks would have been. Also, the adult cowbird can make a sound that sounds like gurgling water. You can hear it here:

As for the grackle, they are sometimes bad neighbors at the feeder, stabbing smaller birds with their beaks or raiding other birds' nests and killing the babies. They don't always do this, but sometimes they do. I have been feeding the birds for over 20 years and there have only been one or two years when the grackles were like that, but when they are, they're relentless. 

All The Little Flamingos

 

All the little flamingos

who used to hang around eating candies

turning themselves pinker by the hour,

where are they now? 

They used to carry Rod McKuen in boho bags

and spice their spring water with Tanqueray. 

All the infallible flamingos

confusing the Salton Sea with the Isle of Capri,

posing on one leg, demure and goddessy.

I miss the little flamingos

riding in paper gondolas, hating the pea hens,

in love with themselves, beatifically banal. 

I misremember the little flamingos

smiling behind Japanese fans, loving leopards

on screens for their mysterious silence.

So shallow and fresh, faces dipped

to the worst most brackish water, honking unmusically,

naked under their feathers, one more awkward than the next.

All the little flamingos.

Scornful, inscrutable, fragile flamingos.

I was there with them.

I was one of them. 

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Poetry Out Loud. 

City of Crows

 

In the city of crows

in the time of autumn,

over the rainy streets the trees

bend and hover like dying grandmothers.

I have been down these streets

on evenings when I did not want to keep living,

and they gave me their susurrations as a balm. 

In the city of crows,

a small village where

everyone in the world lives,

I met a woman who was two shadows,

one behind the other but it was a third who spoke.

I saw only one shadow, heard only the words I already knew.

Now there is no woman, and I know less than when I began.

In the city of crows,

by the canal where the

coins turn to fish of white, gold, and black,

my blood turned to cold water, stopping my heart.

An old acquaintance brought a loaf of bread to my side,

still warm from my own oven or so they said. They hit my heart

with the fist that had held the loaf, and I lived again but in their debt.

In the city of crows,

there is no newspaper, 

and the devices there die

each year when dusk paints the days.

If you want to see me, listen for weeping

in the forest of shadows, where night and leaves fall alike.

I am there, reciting this poem in a second language made of regret,

shame, love, hope, and death. My body is a wick, time the wax,

and the crows the scattering sly-eyed ash.

______

for Desperate Poets. 

Seven Poets

In Hades seven poets

pasting pips on paper crowns

facedown on the sidewalk

holding seven falcons down

woke to find the sugar vein

clogged by golden tusk

and the Genius of the Galaxies

was just shit out of luck.

When seven poets wobble down

the racetrack of the dawn

riding lazy Sensitivity

like bangers of the gong

who spin in gyres like goblins

whose experiments go wrong

when they trade their tongues for bullshit

then say, "Don't you love my song?"

Seven poets claim the globe

of earth and eye and breast

while their dietetic revolution

starves out all the rest

I pray for wolves and pray for beasts

to pry them from their pens

to strip them of their peacock pose

and show them stunted hens.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Michael McClure.

also shared with The Sunday Muse #252. Image by Ruven Afanador

Isla de los Fantasmas

 

On the Isla de los Fantasmas, the keeper's wife

spends dawn searching out exhausted birds on the pebbled beach.

She comes to them as if she were light itself

and believes herself to be light itself

but she is as broken as they are.

Realizing this, and wishing to compensate her for her kindness,

they transfer to her their laments, worn around her heart

like dolmens of sound. Within each one, she dies.

With each dawn, each bird, each song, she dies.

The wind is the keeper's wife singing.

It is not the currents of sky or water that exhaust the birds.

It is the endless impassivity of the surface they cannot bear.

Their wings are the pages of hymnals

their bodies are the bindings of hymnals

that can only close at last on the Isla de los Fantasmas.

The keeper's task is to keep the enormous eye of the light

emptying itself out at the water, and the weary birds.

The light comes to them as if it were the keeper's wife,

and believes itself to be the keeper's wife,

but she is down on the pebbled beach, in her dolmen, singing.

_________

for Sunday Muse #219. 

Isla de los Fantasmas = Island of the Ghosts

a dolmen is a table-shaped tomb made of large flat stones

Impossible Riddles

 " After last night's storm, the tulip petals are strewn across the patio where they mortally fluttered" --Church, Jim Harrison

I woke around 3am again this morning. 

Someone had been talking to me

pushing pebble words through cotton teeth, 

posing impossible riddles,

or,

I was in love with someone already vanishing,

or

something important was expected of me that I could not do.

At 7am I set out seed and peanuts

for the birds and whomever may appear,

maybe even myself, in a new body

not made of seed and feathers.

Everything hurts and I am always tired.

I am as soft and ridiculous as snow, 

holding winter's hand by instinct, leery of warmth, gray as January.

Here come the jays and starlings,

crows and cardinals,

like clockwork.

I watch them from the window and remember a day years ago.

I am both there and not,

here and not.

Dear eager raucous birds, 

will you be here again tomorrow?

Will I?

_______

for Dverse Poetics: "Songs of Unreason"