(in the Olson's blueberry fields)

(in the Olson’s blueberry fields)

  

On Wyeth’s Gull Scarecrow, 1954

  

They’ll be slung rotting on their pole

like men’s heads or women’s heads or if you like

kids heads meant to warn but something

more than the eye and really it’s this:

 

lips and tongue and how on the inside

behind the open bone they’re connected

to the channel of the nose and throat

and halfway down this throat it meets

 

a sound its never known it could

conjure but its true and whole made

of bone and skin and this is what lives

its warning its keep off keep out: what’s

 

seen is suddenly caustic it’s lit

and isn’t a simple gull he shot late spring

and strung up and let lie and fly alone

and only at the beguile and condoning

 

of the wind – listen – even in winter – maybe

especially – when the pole’s become something

entirely new or sawn through for the kitchen

stove there’ll be that one knot and notch

 

and on it a gull’s breast feather caught

like the ravishing is long past the eye and this

is what’s left.  The crop’s gone down gullets

of all the animals you imagine.  And the flocks

 

are spooked or hungered off.  And the thumb

that once run along the beak and paused

on that dot of red on the underneath

still buzzes when it hovers and then lets lie

 

the worth of summer and with something

that might look casual to a passerby

lifts the iron lid and slips it in to make it yet

another reckoning back and back into the sky.

*Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth:

A Conversation with Andrew Wyeth

by Thomas Hoving