voices from the cascadia bioregion

Tonight they line bars of music—
the starlings gathered on wires like hundreds

of crowded sixteenth notes. It’s that way
the world enters your eyes—too much beauty

and song ever to understand. The more
space you take up, the more they press

together on electric lines: the concerto
you bailed on, the instrument you dropped.

Each rounded breast holds feathers. And you
too tender to take the brush against skin—

it lights your nerves. Signals cross
when you talk to the man.

The starlings gather for nightfall,
know their own kind. Would rather sit a spell

beside traffic than become part of a lake
as large as a city. What kind of thoughts besiege

the conductor who faces your particular,
obsessive, sequestered orchestra?

How fast can you count? Will you name
this sonata after the moon or the sun?

 

• 

Stair-steps up twigs in the cherry.
The hammer already early,
the high-pitched nail singing 
            it is the last
of days. 

All my cousins—crows 
            pinned against a white sky.
All my small songbirds 
            fallen silent.

Dishes clank in the kitchen
where Linda lived with her Bible and piano.
With her mother, the Luthier . . .

Are there to be no more willow plates 
            stashed behind glass—the arched bridge
following friends decoupaged in memory
to their four-walled cottages?

What of the hive left like a nest
in the tree,
queen gone, bees still, dancing done?

Shall the three of us waltz 
in place, we who remain behind—
(father, mother, child)
blowsy, tousled  
            as after a night of restless dreams?

Steller’s Jay stair steps as if upon a widows’ walk,
carved from the high forehead,
            the day  moon.

As the newborn eye asks—
            always marbled, filmy—
what shade of blue were you expecting?

 

•