While she talks on the phone,
her blue pen seems to have
a life of its own,
makes abstract flowers
& filigree
& Gordian knots
all around the list of birds seen
on her morning walk.
I watch fascinated
as I eat my allotted three
fresh peanut-butter cookies,
each bearing the print of a fork’s
uncomplicated foot.
A falling leaf
reversed course
& flew.
It sailed up
over the trees
& didn’t stop until
it reached a forest
inside a cloud
in Panama.
You were left
with a double loss:
of the leaf it wasn’t
& of the bird it was.
On the ground
where the leaf
would’ve settled,
A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
The tree without birds
is like a book without vowels
a mind without focus
a heart without tides.
Its limbs remain desolate
in the thick of summer.
It puts out leaves
but forgets to bloom
& its transactions with fungi
are strictly economic,
never lead to any
tempting truffle.
The wind plays it
like a mechanical instrument.
In bluest January
it doesn’t even remember
My teacher resembles a flightless bird:
the sky, to him, is an open book
written in a foreign tongue,
his enormous eyes are no bigger
than his three stomachs & when
he sticks his head in the sand, it isn’t
to evade the truth but to remember it
by being alone with his terrors.
Prosartes lanuginosa
Their ringing isn’t obvious;
you need the ear
of an anchorite to find them.
Listen for water tricking under rocks,
a black-throated green warbler’s
five wheezy notes.
Look beneath creased leaves
& zigzag branches
for a bell of quiet yellow-green
that flares into a six-pointed star,
anthers facing outward
around a stout style—
all of which must drop away
to swell the bell’s heir,
a scarlet clapper.
There were two of them, silent, so unusual
Green Barbets, on the Papaya tree.
A flurry of green wings, heads cocked
They studied the ripe, yellow Papaya.
To lie on bed and watch birds in the morning!
One nibbling on one and the other on the other –
Pity me! The fruits I had hoped to pluck today!
Then hopped down a Woodpecker – what business
Does he dare here, I wonder, this nemesis
Of worms and termites? So do the Barbets –
Awed at his red crest and sharp beak
And how funnily he sat on the stem, so unlike birds!
One Barbet hurried away – the other sidestepped the ‘Pecker
And watched him, like me, head cocked
Jabbing away at the ripe yellow Papaya.
Filled, he left, the mighty Woodpecker
Standing, as often I do, beneath my old mango tree,
I wonder how it would look without the leaves.
Without the mangoes, without the branches
Without the birds that sit preening on them.
The thick trunk sawed off, roots pulled out
Tiles or cement choking the earth.
For one, sunlight would be brighter; and glare
Upon the tiled roof of my house.
No more yellowed leaves to sweep away in the morning.
No more bird droppings to wash off
No more bat-eaten, splattered mangoes.
No more flies swarming around
No more air, thick
With the smell of the ripe, golden fruits.
No more, the tapping of the woodpecker
No more, the screeching kites.
A gentle,
Lapping breeze.
A slight,
Winter chill.
A distant,
Cry of birds.
A peaceful,
Lull of waves.
A passing,
Swimming mermaid.
A blaring,
Faraway fire engine.
A towering,
Threatening dinosaur.
A bleak,
Colourless world.
This particular
shifting of the rain, I am
just in time for it.
Lemon-drop lamp
and its wavering life
reflected in the chai.
Scrawlings, backwards,
in the glass, in the sun,
downtown escalator
Red clouds catching sun,
the hole at Sixth Avenue
dark in minutes.
“Red cells save lives”
reads the bus for the blood drive–
black letters on white.
It’s happened again
My old enemy,
Grown his thick bushy red beard
In the five years since.
String of white tinsel,
Strung between two thin branches
Bowing to the breeze
Her naked bottom
Visible in a white flash
Gone to thunder now.
Electric fan blast
Cave-cold in my left armpit
DVD skipping.
I watch the traffic
Or, did, until tall condos
Replaced the yoga barn
How strange, to have come
March,
forgiven sins at last…
a roast beef sandwich
At my death…
will even the wasted time
comfort me?
He speaks to me
in the dreams I don’t have
until summer
The Air Force man
holds a sapling, two feet
from the root ball
Thick thud,
the cooper’s mallet–
so much sleet!
March…