After Schuyler: Three Poems

I. [1.28.2010]

I am writing again.

I am writing because

Schuyler wrote about

Korean mums.

Because I found him

at a garden table

in October near

where an owl was

dead.

I am writing because

another bird, smaller,

flew across me with

two bands of white

flashing, a shaded

stripe between.

As the owl returned

minutes or days

or months later,

(one cannot tell in a poem)

so returns the urge

to put things down.

To collect, like feathers,

days’ floating news,

fear, dependences.

Birds scratch,

at the rich soil,

knowing & not-knowing

which places have

had seed and might

again, here, where

I start scratching,

too.

II. [For Jeff]

A highway of birds,

not for birds,

(they are the way they go)

knowing as much

by instinct as by sight,

or memory.

It’s  rush hour,

each evening in late March,

while you sit  or stand

smoking, before or after dinner,

front stoop or back yard,

wife & dog near or not near,

(the details not mattering)

you, at least,  there

being in one place,

below them like a

single ant as a jet

takes its cargo home,

standing & looking,

smoke rising up,

but never reaching them,

as they move towards

whatever next rest they

need.

When you tell me

about them through

miles of invisible wire,

or bouncing off  orbiting satellites,

I have just seen a highway too,

as I and the boys played

insect family to a vee of

Canadian geese,

52 miles North

of your street,

as the crow flies.

It is something

to be stationary

while other things

move, to be reminded

of the impossibility

of staying still.

To remain connected

to an earth that

won’t stop turning,

knowing that if it did,

we’d all fall.  And yet,

those highways of birds

must sense that motion,

seeing us spin so slowly,

like tiny ants marching

almost in place, as they

glide looking down at

our continuous failure

to achieve lift.

III. [Lawrence High School East Lawn, Tuesday, April 20^th, 2010, 11:15 am]

The fact that birds are singing is must likely lost on them, because they are not birds and neither are the others they are looking at, listening to, thinking of, and there are cars passing, and the faint echo of loud music, and they are barely alive.

The institutional walls still hold them, even as they take five to ten steps outside the heavy, glass door propped open by a flat rock.

They were asked to write. To go outside, find a solitary spot, and to describe what could be a harmonious place, thinking about how the space surrounding them could come together in such way that things go right: tree, bug, house, road, bird, wall, rock, wind, cloud, humanity.

I suspect that their restraint has as much to do with confusion as it does disdain.

All the while, a wren is still singing.