Across Bedford Avenue
in the fourth floor window
the antique bird print
is bathed in the light
of a Chinese ginger jar lamp.
Her shadow dances
across the wall, arms
wrapped tightly around herself
in the sway of Terpsichore
singing her melancholy song.
I hear only
the cacophony of the drunk
on the corner
braying to the moon
and the rumble
of the lorry
on Tottenham Court Road.
First Published in The Globe Review, Issue 2, April 2023
https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4f02f9b80a.html
A violinist can
look at an Amati
or a Guarnieri
and hear a concerto.
A birder hears
the call of the songbird
and can describe
the beauty of her plumage.
A skilled photographer
looks through the viewfinder
and tells a complete story
with one press of the shutter button.
But it is the poet
alone, staring at a blank page,
who spills onto it joy and sadness,
tears and elation, and his blood.
He was the smallest, that
is what drew you to him.
Still, he had a certain bravado
a serious strut to his walk.
Perhaps it was because
his father was there, a protector
in part, in another part a challenge.
He knew his mother was looking
so it became a matter of pride.
He could imagine himself
a father one day, his own children
trailing behind him threatening
to break away, knowing full well
they were not ready yet, needed
him for protection from
the always present predators.
That was life in the wetland
for most wading birds,
the only life he knew or wanted.
It is that moment when the moon
is a glaring crescent,
slowly engulfed by
the impending night—
when the few clouds give out
their fading glow
in the jaundiced light
of the sodium arc street lamp.
It nestles the curb—at first a small bird—
when touched, a twisted piece of root.
I want to walk into the weed-strewn
aging cemetery, stand in the shadow
of the expressway, peel
the uncut grass from around her headstone.
I remember
her arthritic hands clutching mine,
in her dark, morgueish apartment, smelling
of vinyl camphor borsht.
I saw her last in a hospital bed
where they catalog and store
those awaiting death, stared
at the well-tubed skeleton
barely indenting starched white sheets.
She smiled wanly and whispershouted
my name—I held my ground
unable to cross the river of years
unwilling to touch
her outstretched hand. She had
no face then, no face now, only
an even fainter smell of age
of camphor of lilac of must.
Next to the polished headstone
lies a small, twisted root.
I wish it were a bird
I could place gently
on the lowest branch of the old maple
that oversees her slow departure.
First published in Rattle #23, Spring 2005
Life ought be little more than
arrhythmic motion, a path
we only want to straighten,
to smooth, its natural, necessary
twists and bumps somehow,
for we always see them as
impediments not moments
of joyous indecision where
there are no wrong choices
for each choice unfolds
a new path never trodden,
never imagined or foreseen.
A bird flies to where it needs
to be, but for most that are
not migrating, that place
isn’t known until arrival and
even then, save for nesting,
it is the right place only for
a day, a week, a month
or perhaps only a moment,
for a bird knows only this
moment and this until
there are no more moments.
In that moment
when the gentle chirping
of a small bird
resounds as a pounding
spring deluge, washes away
the creak and thrum
of passing cars, when she sings
only to you, her small voice
drawn in to your ears, your
mind, until it fades
slowly like the bell
and you wait for it
to strike again, to feel
it seep down your spine,
ooze into your fingers
and toes, pool in bent
knees and elbows, folded hands.
In that moment
the gentle chirping
is your voice, and you
are perched in the weeping
cherry tree in the garden
preening in the morning sun.
First published in Creatopia, Issue 5, Spring 2022
https://creatopia.studio/creatopia-collection-magazine/spring-2022-renewal-magazine/
They say that you should
never approach or touch
a small bird, lest it he shunned,
perhaps to death, by your scent.
I’ve never been one to listen
to any “them” with whom I
cannot argue face to face,
and so seeing the small
bird on the ground curled
in its nest, staring up
at the branch from which
she parachuted groundward
I scoop her up in cupped
palms, a nested nest, and place
her gently back at her point
of departure, under the eye
of her mother higher up
in the tree, then walk back
as the mother returns
to the nest and child, and
with a sidelong glance
at me, appears to nod,
saying “this is why we dare
not listen to an unseen them.”
The birds in the wetland
speak to me in my dreams,
telling tales of what this place
was before we arrived
and forever changed it.
They don’t curse us, although
they remind us we are cursed
by our own actions, but
they do pity us, ground bound
living in our own waste.
In the morning the birds
have disappeared, a few
vultures carrying off the bodies
left by the bobcats whose
territory we have made our own.
At night I say a prayer
for the departed birds, and in
my dreams they come again,
and reject my prayer as hollow
and seeking only absolution.
As a young child, I always imagined
myself a bird, poised to take wing
the next time my parents told me
I couldn’t do what I wanted,
to swoop around, out of their grasp,
until it was time for lunch or dinner.
Years later my dream was to be
a pilot, Air Force not Navy, I might
get seasick and that isn’t a sight
even I would want to see, until
I read Jarrell’s “The Death
of the Ball Turret Gunner,” and
the ground seemed a safer place.
Once in the business world, I
thought about some day retiring
young and seeing the world
on the cheap, Asia, Africa, Oceana,
and that lasted until the second
time I had to fly to Japan with
fourteen hours in a coach class
middle seat on a Boeing 747
when my backyard suddenly
became the future of my dreams.
The seed speckles
the snow like buckshot
piled neatly under the branch
where we, fingers numbed,
tied the little chalet
to the lowest limb
of the ancient maple.
The birds stand staring
as the squirrel swings
slowly in the breeze.
First Appeared in Echoes, March – April 1996.
an old writer and his words 