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Sunday, November 17, 2013

Lesser Shorebirds (with Tania P)

Perhaps my love for the namers rivals my love for you: be you godwit, whimbrel, or dowitcher, your tan vault of a self ends in a v and nothing interrupts the fuchsia stem of your bill, tipped black, from its ravaged drilling and suckling for what the retreating waves stir loose below sand's horizon. I want to sift, like you, amid the dark stars of heaven for what god made just for me.

Maybe as a line of pelicans flows low across the water, only a wingbeat from the waves, I set out walking along the shoreline to follow. As ear and eye compete I look to the left, listen to the right; my attention sliding between drifting blankets of birds and the fluttering heartbeat of the sea.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

A Mild Enchantment

Perhaps in a country in which people’s eyes water from their habit of looking both ways before crossing the street, the scent from a common flower is measured to be swifter than thought. 

Maybe in another part of the world, a man reaching his right hand into the pocket of a new coat will find a cold, shiny coin that he will toss to settle an issue of the heart. 

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The Hummingbird's Complaint (with Tania P)

Perhaps the hummingbird, when still, juices the morning complaint. Once airborne he snips his phrase in four. When he lands he barely bends the bough. Whatever the source of his methodical mincing, he repeats himself and I listen again for the triplet trills of silver which come, when they come, towards the middle and cap the end of his arc.

Maybe in the cool mornings of fall when the brightest jewels of the hummingbird’s garden fan out from twining vines, sky blue and fuchsia before a violet sky, each tubular bloom that later curls closed in the heat of the day curls slowly, in its own way – for there is no end that does not end by degree –  as the flower’s secret diary reads: now shuttered closed, I let the room grow dark around me.