Category: Poems & poem-like things

Everyone strives to learn what they don’t know;
few strive to learn what they already know.
– Zhuangzi

I stare at the keyboard as if willing the poems to come forth
& damn me if they don’t! Letter by letter
like the heads of grouse chicks popping up
through the dense grid of feathers
on their mother’s back.
*
Car & horse switch places back & forth –
a not uncommon thing to happen in a dream –
but what I remember in the shower is how,
when the bottom dropped away & the wheels
became swimming, circling hooves,
a raft of sea ducks lifted from the far shore.
*
*
Sure it’s corny to write about birds as angels
but May Swenson can, & gets away with it.
I think now of the sharpie that missed his prey
yesterday by the bird feeder & slammed
full force into the bow window. I ran out
onto the porch in time to see him drop
from a momentary perch in the cedar
& land head-down in the snow, tail twitching.
A half-hour later, dinner in the oven,
I look again: gone. The first juncos
are returning by twos & threes to
the strewn millet.
*
*
*
On snowshoes crossing the wind-
groomed field, sun at
my back, the hissing granules
in motion around my feet

now & again rise like
genies released from their lamps
to spin, veering off
across the field

or growing to sudden whiteout
that tempts me to turn, gaze full
into the sun’s
nimbus of wind! Then calm again,

the sharp silhouettes of spruce
take shape on the hill. I turn back,
under the trackless sky
resume my plodding, trailing behind

this long blue figure whose outlandish legs
lift high with every step,
deliberate as a heron stalking
shimmery fish.
*
*
*
*
Bill Stafford – rest in peace – was dead
wrong. Daily practice may make poems,
but to stop at one’s an impossibility – at least
for those of us, less given to gravity,
in whom enthusiasm rises almost
to the level of possession. Get thee hence,
old workshopper – I’m not buying.
I would trade a hundred inspired lines
for a half-dozen real evening grosbeaks
crowding into the feeder on any
January morning.
__________

NOTES: The May Swenson poem referenced is “Angels at ‘Unsubdued.'”
William Stafford – in many ways the godfather of contemporary North American poetry – is famous for encouraging poets to write a poem every day. For one recent appreciation, see here.

Wisdom Teeth

That time I was marooned
by a toothache – weeping eyes
screwed shut, mouth agape –
I might’ve been taken for someone
in the throes of ecstasy, lying
on the couch with all
the windows open. The weather
was June, and wonderful.
All afternoon I clung to the thread
of the brown thrasher’s song.

Even in extremis it’s simple
to tell a thrasher from his cousin
the catbird: he repeats
almost every improvised line.
Paired phrases sometimes reach
into the low thousands
without repeating.

Pain can sound exactly like
the world, I thought.
Neither can be replicated.
Art lets us exceed
ourselves, and so escape.

Eventually,
both wisdom teeth had to come out.
For a week or two I had to chew
deliberately. Each bite
of food was accompanied
by a mouthful of thought.

Found Object
for G. Z.

The knot of roots that used to be
a bird perched in the lilac bush
now sits long-legged atop
my file cabinet, fast
friends with an alarm clock
and an aloe vera that has dangled
its tattered crown down on
a ridiculous length of rope. What I
can only call a knot may not ever
have been bird – but certainly
something difficult to name
that spoke of hope, Dickinson’s
thing with feathers. The lifted wings,
the fanned tail tell of just-
arrested flight, as if by window
(the wingbone broken in mid-wish,
the tiny clot in the brain that clogs
the unfathomable works) or
from a cell phone tower’s fatal wink.
Frayed muscles can snap, they said,
appalled – the survey team
that found an entire midnight
flock of warblers dead or dying,
littering the ground all around
some guy-wired, steel-girdered
ridgetop Lorelei. It seems
the low clouds & fog forced them down
& the tower’s lights were just right to take
the place of polestars. Imagine it:
to have one’s deep instinctual quest
(like a sex drive, except it’s toward a place)
derailed in favor of this frantic circling –
a comet captured by an unexpected sun.
They will not tell you this on the 6:00
o’clock news. There’s always
some lurid tale of a car crash or drug
bust right down the street, my God,
they were all such good kids, too – straight As,
athletic scholarships . . .
But this – knobs & bumps
of wood, clumped
ends of rhizomes, the grain
that could be feathers, the missing
claws and beak that I neglected
earlier to mention – this isn’t
bird in the hand, but in the bush.
I was myself to blame or credit for it.
(It was I, said the sparrow, with
my little arrow.) I cut it
from the bank with a shovel
when I moved the wall back.
The lilac seemed unaffected.
It remains a sturdy refuge from
the sharp-shinned hawk, a place
where bluebird or cardinal straight
from the bath can ruffle dry their feathers, &
where a hundred other contingencies
might flourish – wholly unguessed at –
down among the baroque
& deliberate roots.