Tag Archives: bluejay

Six late-August evenings (5)

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Six late-August evenings (5)

5.
Ithaca, 1987. Walking down the middle of a street
In Collegetown. Above my head in the oak arching

Over the road, splattering sunlight like a Pollock
Being painted over every second under my feet,

The eternal drone of a lone cicada. No over or under,
No depth or arc, no resolution. Through the oak leaves

A bluejay flashes through with the suddenness
Of a thing that carries its own sky. The drone stops,

The cicada’s head drops papery at my feet like
An origami animal of surprise that even the eternal dies.

*

Charlottesville, twenty years later. My children call it
The jungle. Half the back yard shaded by maple,

Mimosa and oak. A path meandering along its fenced perimeter
Between saplings and ivy. The jungle extends through

The entire neighborhood’s backyards as if by communal
Design. The broad winged hawk has taken up residence

Because the neighbors behind us feed songbirds.
We feed the nightstain of crows that drop on our deck

In the morning, ungainly dew, to pluck last night’s dinner scraps
From our crow trough. On a hot August afternoon I walk

From the deck to the edge of the jungle. Something has caught
My eye: a blade of blue sticking from the grass.

It’s a bluejay feather, standing in the earth like a pen, its quill
Embedded several inches into the ground. A few feet

Beyond that, the impossibly soft white belly feathers, strewn
Like an exploded dandelion. A few feet away, nothing else

But the bluejay’s head. So much smaller in its silence.

Thoughts in Early May

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Thoughts in Early May

I can still outrun my children
but the race has to be very short

or very long. And the middle space
widens every day,

We drove out of town in early spring
to visit a friend of my daughter

whose family makes church organs
among the folded hills of Virginia farmland.

There the metal is boiled and poured
in a long flat trough, so thin it can

be rolled into the pipes that channel
air into faith-appropriate pitch.

The cows leisurely await their doom
in the fields all around.

The sharp shinned hawk flies low

across the field and alights on an old post.
The family’s house is a crossroad of winds–

every stiff breeze in the valley seems to force
its way toward the house, from every direction,

speeding through foothill and gap,
funneled by finely ill-mapped roads,

reaches their yard finally as a constant gale
ripping the voice from trees and shrubs as we stumble

to the side door. My daughter’s friend
is used to it, she shouts from the porch, it never ends.

I think it is all the winds of the world auditioning
for a chance to flow through those pipes

and into the shadows of stillness
and be heard as something straight from God.

At home it is calm as a confessional.
The library across the street is closed.

We always have books to bring back,
and we always find them when the library

is closed. The silver maple next door
is so covered with English ivy it should be dead

but it has bloomed again this year,
enough to make the blue jay invisible.

I recognize his pitched query as others recognize
in the church organ the vowels of God.

I hear, in my own breath as I stand on the porch,
that same fierce longing as those winds

to become somebody else’s voice.

Morning, After the Ice Storm

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Morning, After the Ice Storm

 

The bluejay’s query from the previous twilight
hangs in the mostly empty air between branches.

On a brown maple leaf last night’s tear
has still not fallen. Though in a few hours

this moment will be gone like all the others
even grief sometimes has to wait its turn

Early March, Above Freezing, Light Snow

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Early March, Above Freezing, Light Snow

 

Five mourning doves gather on close branches.
But the sky in the trees is too miserable for mourning.

Even the earth will not accept the night’s snow
which sits in clumps on the ground like oil on water.

It highlights fallen trees on the mountain slope
showing all the directions down can take you.

Between the shed and a crack in the clouds
two bluejays mate in a flurry on a fallen ladder.