Red-winged blackbird fiercely defends
his territory through song
if you could hear his words
the song would not be pretty,
but fierce, the savage heart of hate
crying deceptively, making you believe
he is beautiful in the sunlight.
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Evening
The bare trees lace the horizon
around the pink of sunset
one crow
flies over the field, looking
for something less fortunate.
Once I asked my friend Gena
if she knew what that evening feeling was:
that strange longing when you see the vanishing point
that pull from the crow that says follow.
Of course she knew.
All children do.
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Chrysalis
I've been quiet
lately
growing new things in solitude
splitting my skin open
changing, quietly, while you thought
I might have been dead. Not dead
just quiet.
But soon
when the time is right and I
have added enough to bear me aloft
I'll split open again
to enter the sun
stretch my wings,
and fly away.
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Wings
Sometimes the two baskets I carry
weigh me down; one thick in each hand
bread and flowers (food and poetry)
they hang off of me like ripened fruit
daring you, pick one
but there can be no decision: they balance
without one or the other I'd fall
and maybe never get up.
I walk through the grey streets, hanging
the baskets on my back like wings
only heavy, wings that hold me to ground
and either one you look in
says the same thing:
here is a stranger everywhere.
But without these earth-weight wings,
without both bread and wildflowers,
I would never, ever fly.
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Note from a Future Missing Person
Someday I will disappear
like Ambrose Bierce.
Everyone will have a different theory
where I went, and why.
Maybe a man with a black cape
riding a black horse
stopped for me, and I could not say no
to his offer of a ride into mystery.
Or maybe I fled to Ireland
to stand over Yeats' grave
and tell him, we saw the falcons gyre uncontrolled,
we saw the Center give way, the rough beast rouse.
Maybe the saucer came for me, and I went home.
Or maybe I found the lost
Island of the Faeries, and swam across.
They'll all be guessing.
My relatives will set a place for me
at the Thanksgiving table, as if I might
burst through the door,
full of stories of my adventures.
Generations later
they'll still be wondering.
My name will still be with them, a riddle,
the mystery never solved.
That's how I'll go.
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Metamorphosis
Does that halfway creature
Between worm and butterfly
Ever think, "Is this really worth the effort?
Is it worth the risk to fly?"
Then does it stop in mid-thought
And give itself reply:
"No, I cannot turn back now.
We're not quitters, us butterflies."
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They Lie about Leda
They do not speak of clawed webbed feet
scrabbling against her soft belly,
of how she struggled, her futile arms
beaten back by wide white wings,
or how she washed herself afterward:
ten, twenty times to feel clean again,
how she swelled with the monstrous,
regrettable birth.
They don�t ask
if the children resented their conception,
with all the neighbors clicking their tongues
and gods expecting greatness from them.
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