sprung fully formed
like a god from the lung
will you rot back
into a travesty of spring
what birds would roost
in the untuning forks of your limbs
and what would they sing
like a real tree do you yearn
to be free of oxygen
bronchial to a fault
would you burn
brings marvels:
a phoebe diving for snow fleas,
the track of a chipmunk,
a turkey vulture flapping its wings.
25 years
since the snow that brought it down
measured in moss
after the chainsaw
the silence
big as ever
windthrow
ice storm
blizzard
where are the canopy gaps of yesteryear
one small bird
to salvage all those logs
winter wren song
one katydid
this late in the season
texting my wife
migrant flycatcher
swiping its beak back and forth
on a bare branch
a plastic toy football
unearthed by the summer floods
all the stream’s voices
rain-softened ground
even the gravel road
has a bit of give
downy rattlesnake
plantain leaves
always a start
still twisted
from its rush to leaf out
lady’s-slipper orchid
the blue-headed vireo’s
vireo vireo
sounds blue now
pale pipes scorched
and straightened by sex
corpse plants
Let me down one cat a time:
the cat that wakes me by sitting on my face
the cat that ignores me
the cat that pushes vases off of tables
the cat that was once magic but now just lies around and gets fat
the cat that kills birds out of irritation at their wings
and the cat that disappears in the middle of a sentence
like a body flung from a bridge while the soul
carries on, oblivious,
yowling about the goddamn hunter’s moon.
The poem behind the poem says
what do we do with the other
creatures of this world?
Those that stay put, stay put;
those that move, raise their mobile
devices to the window
and press record. What do we do
with the other languages of this world,
the other ways to forget or fall silent?
Dogs can’t be the only ones
whose vocalizations have adapted
to the inattentiveness of the human ear.
And there’s a bird in New Guinea
that can imitate with equal accuracy
a camera shutter or a chainsaw.
What do we do with ourselves
Hooded, worm-eating,
cerulean, black-throated green.
I tick off the names
like prayer beads,
and later, when a black snake
rears up like an instant tree,
I remember all
the deadly false Edens,
the acres of glass.
The beech tree has seven eyes
where limbs used to be,
each of them gazing upward.
Down below, the scars
of old, knife-cut graffiti:
Smoke Up. Fly High. Manson Lives.
A warbler in the crown
of a neighboring oak,
its shadow crossing my face.
Fungi are like us—
absorbing oxygen, releasing CO2.
This puffball is an abandoned factory.
I nudge the intact wall
with the point of my umbrella.
It’s all out of smoke.
Ovenbirds and the black morel,
writes a friend.
Impossible to see.
A winter wren darts low
over the rushing stream
and unwinds its hurdy-gurdy song.
Not all water-lovers
are bouyant in the same way.
The waterthrush walks
on the bottom, tail bobbing
as if spring-loaded. We stand
dripping in the rain.
Small birds fly up
into the bare branches
of the walnut trees.
The phone rings.
Someone we know has had
another breakdown.
At the sound of my voice,
six deer delicate as ballerinas
raise their tails to leap.