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Dave Bonta
An empty half-walnut shell lay
upturned on the verandah.
The wren fluttered down
& poked at it with his bill,
hopping all around it
in his big clown feet.
The black walnut half
had two large openings
like holes in a round kayak.
The wren probed one
& then the other, leaving nothing
to chance.
It was time for tea on the verandah,
but nobody came.
The wren flew off.
The walnut shell rocked a few times
wren like a public hope
little but neat
as well-dressed as the barber
in a street of ash
the wren can nest
like a head full of evil
now saying nothing
to save his place
in the purple-stemmed
jungle of pokeweed
last year’s skeletons
goldenrod meadow
forty acres and a wren
the somewhere else
that is also here
ridge after ridge
too big to hide
the spider draws in her legs
and turns to gemstone
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.
I knew the miles
before the markers, I found the west
by walking with the sun. I said,
there are lizards in my blood,
there is sandstone in my teeth.
I said, I am the light's daughter,
I am a cactus wren.
This is my home among the thorns.
I said to trees, to starlight,
I said to graves and streets and men,
and you said,
Girlchild, I live too far out in the desert.
I whispered into corners, I wove into
papyrus: I am the light's daughter,
I am a cactus wren,
I raised my hand from lifetimes of loving,
Wren leads the charge,
her small soldier heart.
Follow her flitting sound
into the lowest corridors
This is not a universe,
It is a garden.
Trees,
a hierarchy of halls,
halls, a universe to sing.
Follow wren’s sound
into the lowest corridors.
There,
a huge gap, fox
-made,
is where blackbirds sing.
Stone-plateaued,
Soon amid the inviolable places
Will green, rustling steeples chime again
With the sweet, glassy bell-notes of the wren.
Soon the plain shall lie beneath blue spaces —
Bold and broad and ruddy in the sun,
Long and lean to the moon when day is done.
Soon will come the strange, heart-lifting season
When through the dark, still dawns, where nothing was,
Steals the mysterious whisper of growing grass;
And a joy like pain possesses the soul, without reason,
Between the budding of day and the lapse of night,
With the clear, cold scent of wet starlight.