Just So

Just

So

  

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

 

                                    Christian Wiman

                                    From a Window         

 

 

Eighteen above.  The frost

has paused on the blond

dropped curlings of the fallen

 

maple leaves.  Tell me,

please, does this thin

edge, that glistens when

 

the sun is unsuddenly

above the mountain, lift

its chin in longing, a longing

 

only a whole night of

the descension into a dark

that settles on the ground

 

like a sentinel, tailored

from the remains of

the afternoon rain,

 

or some intuited resolve,

each drop of water,

whatever her size, becomes

 

a humble letter in an alphabet

we see only

as brief pliable diamonds

 

and sundry prisms

able to rise the way spirit

levels rise when

  

the light and hand and eye

caresses them, bone-glow

to balance, prop, stabilize,

 

a breath of it inside of us

remaining, that sentinel,

just so.

Brief the Sparrows

 

Brief the Sparrows

                  for Nancy...

Somehow it is enough knowing the shadow

is visibly older than the object it blots

while soaking somehow the light right

 

above it, a noon at night, its bright being

a windless insistence tight along the line –

in this case the gable end facing south & her

 

reflection in the filled to the brim

birdbath.  Last week the remaining few

of the migrating songbirds, the species

 

of sparrow clutching the bare rose-

vine or goldenrod paused in the offering

remains of autumn.  I watched them settle

 

only to vanish into the dying grasses,

watched them rise when one line of light started

to slide from behind the bright canopy

 

of the sugar-maple yet clutching most of her

variegated fill of her yet living quilt.  Watched them,

their flight of sky casting bits of code

 

on the lawn, a dot of longing: dit-dah-dit-dit-dit-

dah-dit-dit; their equally brief, in this shadow,

--. --- --- -.. -. .. --. …. -

see, it's this specific

 

see, it’s this specific 

 

seed, with

the monarch’s need

having ceased,

with all that sap

tapped

 

having been

dipped

into and sipped

flittingly,

 

it’s this seed’s

metamorphoses

of cellulose to silk,

a floss

so insistingly soft in her

offering, having been

given this 

much volume

within her skin

 

that stops me and makes into me

 

a surrendering contemplative

 

and by that I mean: see

how the pod

can do nothing

but ultimately

cede to this

division, where her dam of milk

                        -weed skin

has, though not suddenly,

(invisibly, it seams, unseams, within, listen… 

 

 

 

…)

 

 

thrust her heft

against the quartered horn to force

her hull-throat to open

to wind’s casual oscillation

once, it's worth

the weight, 

it’s risen 

At the Gate

 At the Gate    

 

“Enlightenment,” wrote one master,

“is an accident, though certain efforts make you accident-prone.”

 

                                    Jane Hirshfield

                                    Inspiration

 

You look, though only once

or twice in your entire

lifetime as a mother

and say: I made

                        this, and you hold the bones & the still

                        living skin

                        & thumb the knuckles, counting them counting on them

                        to be always

                        warm always present

                        always gentle almost al

                                                            ways

 

                                    (there will be days weren’t there aren’t there

                                                those days)

 

                                    & you flatten the palm and want

                                    to read every pattern

                                    every alphabet to divine

                                    a future.  But you don’t.  You don’t.  Instead

                                    you close your child’s hand over

                                    yours & bring the knuckles

                                    to your mouth & touch them

                                    the way you used to

 

                                    when they were new

                                    when they were small

                                    when they were skinned

                                                & bleeding

 

                                    & you tasted the blood

                                    you made and you say 

                                    and you say

late in the day, consider this

 

late in the day,

consider this:

 

perhaps the osprey, falling

up from its coffer of odd

jigsaw seeming branches

is a possible thought coming to

 

shape: the breathing

of a phoenix, those old

souls that go down into their own

heat and flame and disappear

 

there for a while, gone the way

camouflage is gone to the one

who is viewing far,

trying to reconcile the fire

 

aerated to ash with

the rising up from it all almost

entirely intact, brand new,

and sifting from its breast,

 

indeed every feather’s vane

and barb, the minute bones of all

those ancient lives, and wedding them

with the paradox of its only just

 

now, this moment, beginning.

A Flowering: Non-Finito

A Flowering: Non-Finito

 

The lilacs are succumbing to rust &

their perfume is thinning.  Today

it is giving rain.  Maybe the river

 

has risen in the night & we’re fitting

the barricades of stone and sand

in a lull between storms. 

 

Maybe what’s coming is nothing

but sun & maybe the mouths &

throats of the changing will (with

 

the help of a breath of low wind) turn

their faces to us & offer the water

on their faces to the old star

 

that burns & churns & turns,

that coaxes and explodes & coaxes

us close to it like 

A Still LIfe

 

A Still Life

 

Once, when I was a boy

I brought him a dead bird.  “Here,”

he said, putting it to my nose,

“smell freedom.”

 

                        Tom Crawford

                        Yellow-Breasted Chat

 

Somehow the gloves are too much

though I do pick up

the bluebird with them on—

 

the grass where he lay is still

last year’s grass where only a few

weeks ago, winter beat her last

 

retreat.  There were ants

discovering his beak, and I touched

him with my thumb to brush

 

them off but they continued on

with their business.  He seemed

only moments

 

dead, & I cupped him in my

gloved palm curved

like a nest.  I thought, how

 

did you die?  I thought: you look

so, oh I don’t know,

alive!  I thought: you are

 

so blue!  I thought: I’ve never seen

such blue so close

to me.  I thought:

 

I am sorry

you won’t see spring through

to summer or your probably

  

already begun brood.  Now the dead

seem to flit in and out

of my making my way to the taller

 

grass where I saw a young

fox a week ago.  In a little

bowl of a knoll, hands now

 

bare, (have you ever

held a bird like this, close

to your wrist & fingers, its weight

 

shaking the world under you, and you,

numb with love and sorrow?

Have you?)

 

If I were John

James Audubon I would have set

the bird on a perch, on an edge

 

of a water filled tin or ceramic

or mosaic bath.  I would have

posed him, opened his wings, & by

 

some trick made him briefly alive

again.  But the gods did not

make me an Audubon.  They made me

 

a dropped seed.  They made this

circumstance of meeting

and the eventual grass and maybe

 

that fox, they made

the mathematics of it, the equation

of what’s random, what’s

 

circumstance, what’s coin-

cadence of one moment being a being

beating the air and next being a being

 

at rest in the hands of a lesser blaze.