Red Bird: Poems (3 page)

Summer Morning

Heart,
    I implore you,
        it’s time to come back
            from the dark,

it’s morning,
    the hills are pink
        and the roses
            whatever they felt

in the valley of night
    are opening now
        their soft dresses,
            their leaves

are shining.
    Why are you laggard?
        Sure you have seen this
            a thousand times,

which isn’t half enough.
    Let the world
        have its way with you,
            luminous as it is

with mystery
    and pain—
        graced as it is
            with the ordinary.

Small Bodies

It is almost summer. In the pond
the pickerel leap,
and the delicate teal have brought forth
their many charming young,
and the turtle is ravenous.
It is hard sometimes, oh Lord,
to be faithful.
I am more boldly made
than the little ducks, paddling and laughing.
But not so bold
as the turtle
with his greasy mouth.
I know you know everything—
I rely on this.
Still, there are so many small bodies in the world,
for which I am afraid.

Winter and the Nuthatch

Once or twice and maybe again, who knows,
the timid nuthatch will come to me
if I stand still, with something good to eat in my hand.
The first time he did it
he landed smack on his belly, as though
the legs wouldn’t cooperate. The next time
he was bolder. Then he became absolutely
wild about those walnuts.

But there was a morning I came late and, guess what,
the nuthatch was flying into a stranger’s hand.
To speak plainly, I felt betrayed.
I wanted to say: Mister,
that nuthatch and I have a relationship.
It took hours of standing in the snow
before he would drop from the tree and trust my fingers.
But I didn’t say anything.

Nobody owns the sky or the trees.
Nobody owns the hearts of birds.
Still, being human and partial therefore to my own
    successes—
though not resentful of others fashioning theirs—

I’ll come tomorrow, I believe, quite early.

Crow Says

There is corn in the field,
what should I think of else?

Anyway, my thoughts are all feathery.
I prefer simple beak talk.

Maybe it’s having wings.
It does make a difference.

As for that business about brothers,
of course I’m concerned that we

share the corn, to the extent
that I get my plenty.

As for later, how can “later” exist?
When old crows die I don’t cry,

I peck at their silly, staring eyes
and open my wings and fly to

wherever I want to. I’ve forgotten
both father and mother,

even the pile of sticks
in which I was born. Well, maybe

now and again, and mostly in winter,
I have strange, even painful ruminations.

When you’re hungry and cold
it’s hard to be bold, so I sulk,

and I do have dreams sometimes, in which
I remember the corn will come again,

and vaguely then I feel that I am almost feeling
grateful, to something or other.

Sometimes

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
    or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
    a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
    some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.

3.

Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
    drowse of creation,

when it began to break.

In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour the sky was filled
    with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lightning brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention
.
Be astonished
.
Tell about it
.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
        but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
    thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again—
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably—
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
    one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Percy (Nine)

Your friend is coming I say
to Percy, and name a name

and he runs to the door, his
wide mouth in its laugh-shape,

and waves, since he has one, his tail.
Emerson, I am trying to live,

as you said we must, the examined life.
But there are days I wish

there was less in my head to examine,
not to speak of the busy heart. How

would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not
thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

Black Swallowtail

The caterpillar,
    interesting but not exactly lovely,
humped along among the parsley leaves
    eating, always eating. Then
one night it was gone and in its place
    a small green confinement hung by two silk threads
on a parsley stem. I think it took nothing with it
    except faith, and patience. And then one morning

it expressed itself into the most beautiful being.

Red

All the while
I was teaching
in the state of Virginia
I wanted to see
gray fox.
Finally I found him.
He was in the highway.
He was singing
his death song.
I picked him up
and carried him
into a field
while the cars kept coming.
He showed me
how he could ripple
how he could bleed.
Goodbye I said
to the light of his eye
as the cars went by.
Two mornings later
I found the other.
She was in the highway.
She was singing
her death song.
I picked her up
and carried her
into the field
where she rippled
half of her gray
half of her red
while the cars kept coming.
While the cars kept coming.
Gray fox and gray fox.
Red, red, red.

Showing the Birds

Look, children, here is the shy,
flightless dodo; the many-colored
pigeon named the passenger, the
great auk, the Eskimo curlew, the
woodpecker called the Lord God Bird,
the …
Come, children, hurry—there are so many
more wonderful things to show you in
the museum’s dark drawers.

From This River, When I Was a Child,
I Used to Drink

But when I came back I found
that the body of the river was dying.

“Did it speak?”

Yes, it sang out the old songs, but faintly.

“What will you do?”

I will grieve of course, but that’s nothing.

“What, precisely, will you grieve for?”

For the river. For myself, my lost
joyfulness. For the children who will not
know what a river can be—a friend, a
companion, a hint of heaven.

“Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”

I said: it can be a friend. A companion. A
hint of heaven.

Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears
Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.