Birds, Indran Amirthanayagam
Birds that eat salt,
hand about cemeteries,
forage in abandoned lots,
civil war crows
fattened on carnage
from roadside bombs,
gorged vultures
loping from body
to body, picking
eyes clean
before clambering
up into trees
that have survived
hanging still
over the silent beach.
Haikus, Jack Kerouac
The little sparrow
on my eave drainpipe
is looking around
The smoke of old
naval battles
is gone
Listen to the birds sing!
All the little birds
Will die!
Dusk—the bird
on the fence
A contemporary of mine
IV from Imaginary Elegies, Jack Spicer
Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit
As if five years had thickened on their flesh
Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
To make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
Shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.
The lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells
The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
Before you wake. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
For love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon
The dreaming groins, their creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
To make me think that I have kept a house
While playing doll? This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
That two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
When I was seized with madness, or was I seized
And mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
And moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
That makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone. No realer than old
Poetry. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear seagulls call. They’re going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.
Poems of Air, Mark Strand
The poems of air are slowly dying;
too light for the page, too faint, too far away,
the ones we’ve called The Moon, The Stars, The Sun,
sink into the sea or slid behind the cooling trees
at the fields edge. The grace of light is everywhere.
Some summer day or winter night the poems will cease.
No one will weep, no one will look at the sky.
A heavy mist will fill the valleys,
an indelible dark will rain on the hills,
and nothing, not a single bird, will sing.
Haikus, Jack Kerouac
Birds singing
in the dark
in the rainy dawn
Wine at dawn
—The long
Rainy sleep
Prayerbeads
on the Holy Book
—My knees are cold
After the shower
among the drenched roses,
The bird thrashing in the bath
Beautiful young girls running
up the library steps
With shorts on
In the Library, Ed Ochester
the silent girl,
the ugly one,
waits out the spring above her books;
her thoughts poise between
pleasures in the strong sun
and the despair her fragile body brings.
She is the white crane
staring downward,
conscious of her reed neck
that the smallest stone can break.
24, Osip Madelstam
Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.
In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.
And over the evening forest
the bronze moon climbs to its place.
Why has the music stopped?
Why is there such silence?
Black Rook in Rainy Weather, Sylvia Plath
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain-
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent
Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honor
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical
Yet politic, ignorant
Of whatever angel any choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
Hummingbirds, Norman Dubie
They will be without arms like God.
By the millions their dried skins will be sought
In the New World.
Their young will be like wet slugs.
They will obsess the moon
Over a field of night-flowering phlox.
Their nests will be a delicate cup of moss.
In pairs
They will feast on a tarantula in thin air.
They have made a new statement
About our world—a clerk in Memphis
Has confessed to laying out feeders
Filled with sulphuric acid. She says
God asked for these deaths… like God
They are insignificant, and have visited us
Who are wretched.
A Coney Island of the Mind (27), Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Peacocks walked
under the night trees
in the lost moon
light
when I went out
looking for love
that night
A ring dove cooed in a cove
A cloche tolled twice
once for the birth
and once for the death
of love
that night
