When You Love a Doomed Thing

 

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win. 

Friends say, can't you feel

the tremble, can't you see the lean?

but love is a bird that can only do as birds do

until the day it dies.

There is a fire and split inside me now

with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would.

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win.

Kitty (a pantoum)

 

Your cat has killed my singing bird

she sunk her teeth into its throat

and now, its every song deferred

it wears a reddened funeral coat.

She sunk her teeth into its throat

and left its body on the mat

an ornament for Charon's boat

does kitty give a damn for that?

She left its body on the mat

and licks her paws without a care

does kitty give a damn for that

or anybody anywhere?

She licks her paws without a care

her tail she'll switch in plain disdain

for anybody anywhere

she casually causes pain.

Her tail she'll switch in plain disdain

for having killed my singing bird

or casually causing pain

by any bloody song deferred.

____________

The Word Garden Word List is very much active and can be found HERE. 

The Death of November

 

November has died, of a fever, in bed

under gray blankets made of wind and dusk.

I had called out to it before, full of a strange joy,

saying, 

                   see how the maples and pear trees

                   send their red-haired daughters down

                   like roses from the pale hands of virgins

to lie at the feet of autumn's wounded matador.

November has died, and must be sewn into

 a snow-shroud to be carried by somber hearse

past the last of the violets by the garden wall,

still living

                        like children up past their bedtimes,

                        wearing brocade vests, leather shoes

                       and shirts with sleeves of brilliant green

waiting for the west to swallow their parents, and their pasts.

November has died, and the shade has been drawn.

A new lodger arrives, talking too loudly, eyes as bright

as polished coins, holding a glazed sweet in one hand

raised up

                         as if it were a goblet full of honey, taking no

                         notice of the widows with their black mantillas

                         wrapping the last cornbread cake in a cloth,

for the sad mongrel who lies down on November's chilly grave.

______________-

Clover Flowers

 

I have a memory of a clover field--

white flowers in the warm June green

like spilled sugar on a farm wife's sleeve.

I have a memory of a spring lamb--

carried to the shed as the ewe screams

under a summer sky blank as muslin.

In the farm house, an old couch.

a television, and a sturdy oak table.

There is a savory aroma and mint jelly

set out with the white china plates.

My memories mix like a bowl of vegetables,

gravy on the tablecloth, blood on the ax.

I don't like to remember,

even in summer, on a bright afternoon.

_______

for What's Going On? "Memory"

Music: Cat Stevens Into White

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.