Nocturne (Blue Grosbeak)
Why tremble
when nothing
arrives to be seen?
The architecture
of the day
comes and goes
in the same
heartbeat,
a disturbance
more felt than heard.
But listen.
The grosbeak sings
his presence
and departs,
leaving behind
the echo
of a motion
blending with night.
The air is cool.
A leaf utters
its own message
and falls
unnoticed.
Nothing awaits it.
Thinking of Li Po at Sky’s End (after Tu Fu)
Cold wind rises at the sky’s end.
What does he consider?
And when will the geese arrive?
The rivers and lakes are full this autumn
but poets’ fates are seldom pleasant.
Demons love to see us fail.
Let’s think of dead Ch’u Yuan
and offer poems to the river.
The transliteration on Chinesepoems.com reads:
Thinking of Li Po at the End of the Sky
Cold wind rise sky end
Gentleman thought resemble what?
Goose what time come?
River lake autumn water much
Literature hate fate eminent
Demons happy people failure
Respond together wronged person language
Throw poems give Miluo
According to the notes at Chinesepoems.com, the wild goose is a symbol of autumn, letters and travellers in difficulties. The wronged person is Qu Yuan, a poet of the fourth century BC who drowned himself in the Miluo river – another exiled poet later threw some verses into the river as an offering to him.
Mockingbird
Withdrawn, it unfolds
to another
voice, like that
of a child lost in the wind.
Or, lonely, it rises from its place
and sings, only
to return and start again.
The pleasure we accept derives from
the knowledge that we are not alone.
Each morning we walk out and sit
by the stones, hoping to observe some
new patterns in his life. What we
see is an answer. What we hear is no song.
Hummingbird (3)
Arriving from nowhere,
its mouth opens
but what escapes
comes not from within
and is never complete.
Words, too, falter
in this space,
struggling to remain
aloft, challenged yet free,
an exchange
between air and wing,
of sound and thought,
occurring as it must
without design
or desire, simply
there, then gone,
a presence one notices
in its absence.
Hummingbird
The thought makes
trembling so
incomplete, a consequence
of knowledge attained. I look out
and see leaves flitting in the dusk,
the air closing around them
like the mouth of an old well
swallowing light. Such
hunger we find difficult
to comprehend. The wind shivers
through our lives and repeats itself,
though differently each time.
Every departure is a return.
Originally published in 1987 in a short-lived publication called The Balcones Review, this is the opening of a longer work. Today, as I look out my window at that same tree, I hear the birds, no longer silent.
Uccello
the wind is what
the stillness
desires to say
each instant
collapsing into itself
like a bud
returning
to the seed
listen
the birds in my tree
are silent
as echoes
before their brief
lives are
silent
something thrashes
in the leaves
the feather
spiraling
slowly
is not only what
it is
as the candle
is more
than flame
or a moment
curling
to darkness
the question
is of clarity
I built a frame
but placed
nothing in it
the wind
blows through
quietly as if
between silences
there exists
only silence or
light
the familiar embrace
unfolding
The formatting isn’t right. Not wanting to waste more time on learning code (hey, I barely have enough time to write), I’ve decided to instead provide a pdf of how the poem should look. It might be interesting to compare the two.
O at the Edges 