September 28–October 7, 2010
THE CORNER ROOM
I am back in the old house on the hill,
daughter, grandmother, sister, ghost. The feet
I follow are my children’s feet, and mine.
Who is the child in this empty room that grieves?
So little moves the air the live-oak leaves
quiver only now and then. The grey-green pine
semi-stunned hangs in the silence of the heat.
I had forgotten how this place is still.
LATE SEPTEMBER BIRD
There is a big discussion going on
down in the oaks around the barn.
The council of the acorn woodpeckers
proceeds with yells and laughter, squawking, purring.
Up here by the house, less is occurring.
The hawk flies over with a peevish curse.
The towhees hold quite still. Then they return
to ground-work. The one wren is here and gone.
There is a bird I wish I knew; at dawn
it sings three notes, just while the day is born,
a falling cadence, sad, and yet it stirs
delight in me intense almost past bearing.
THE KNOCKING
The birds have fallen silent. A loud, deep,
intermittent, hollow knocking sound
comes from the barn. Not the woodpeckers’ fast
snare-drumming. This is something bigger.
A messenger, a prisoner, a beggar,
the wind gusting, an owl, a restless ghost.
Or all of those. This is a troubled ground
where old and unborn spirits wake from sleep.
TURKEY VULTURES
The bird books always say they have no voice.
Maybe they say nothing in most places,
but who else could be making that rough,
faint croaking in the woods up there?
Maybe they’re dumb where we make so much noise
and only speak in such rare quiet places
as this, where I hear now the slow huff . . . huff . . .
of wide black wings that loft through silent air.
THE MOUSE-COLORED DOE
The doe walks with almost a pause
after each step, lifting each delicate
leg up like a marionette;
she hesitates without apparent cause,
flicks her big ears again, goes on
through the high barren grass of early fall
serene, unhurried, and aware of all
that threatens her or she can live upon.
JUAN DOLORES
My mother told, when I was little, how
I’d grab his finger, my hand being too small
to get a hold on his, and shout, “Go? Go?”
And Juan would go at baby pace beside me
up to the road gate—fifty yards in all—
a mighty expedition for me then. And now,
eighty years later, again I find it so.
O for the patient, big, dark hand to guide me!
TURKEY VULTURES II
Maybe they don’t say anything because
they know more about death than anyone,
so intimately that they needn’t talk about it
among themselves. And no one else wants to hear them:
they’re smelly, shameful, ugly, don’t go near them.
And so they keep their quiet company, uncrowded,
and sweep great silent circles in the sun
to praise the lord of life, his ways and laws.
THE EVERYDAY
First light. The arc of the old moon was rising
in a windy dawn that quickly grew behind it.
Silver-bright at first, it dimmed and thinned
till it was lost in a vast radiance.
What happens every day is what’s surprising.
The treasure’s never where I look to find it
but where I simply look—the sky, the wind,
sunrise, a silver arc, the moment’s chance.
AUTUMNAL
Sun’s hot, breeze cool, autumnal. Dragonflies
appear on wide transparent wings, and soar,
and disappear. Down among oak-world shadows,
dark tapestries of leaf and arching branch,
the little redhead clown birds flit and start.
It’s strange to see these hills with present eyes
I hold so clear in my mind always, strange once more
to hear the hawk cry down along the meadows
and smell the tarweed, to be here—here at the ranch,
so old, where I was young—it hurts my heart.
ACORN WOODPECKER
Bright black-and-white, a bright red head, a bright
mad eye, he looks in from the windowsill
three feet away, but doesn’t see me. Now he tries
the frame for grubs, finds none, flits to the oak,
gets himself perched and firmly braced upright
by bending in his tail, begins to drill,
works hard a while, and then flick, off he flies.
Bird of my heart! half holy and half joke!
THE CORNER ROOM, II
An hour or more yet till the sky turns blue
and the first sunlight strikes across the hills.
It’s cold, it’s still, and lying here I’m free
to drift among the years, float on their flowing.
A child could climb out the north window to
the crotch of the big oak whose foliage fills
the east window. It was a sapling tree
when this was Betsy’s room. Oaks are slow growing.