A Spinning Gift for the Turning Moment (from the journal)

  

Catbird on the hammock.

It’s me that’s caught

her eye.  8-1-13

A gentle pendulum,

hummingbird’s tail

moves across the rosy sharons

as green as the leaves.  8-1-13

No sun to open the sharons,

hummingbird sits on yesterday’s closed flowers

and pokes with her beak.  8-1-13

Irritated wren

moves across the woods

faster than my eye.  8-1-13

Feathered yellow light

holds up two yellow swallowtails

nettled in a swirl.  8-4-13

That red-breasted bird lowers her breast

into last year’s red leaves in the one spot of sun

this cool morning.  Rufous-sided towhee.  8-5-13

That squirrel made the forest move.

Bee makes the sharon move.

The gray air makes nothing move.  8-6-13

Sky clouds moving east.

Earth clouds moving west.

Counterpoint before the rain.  8-20-13

Pye weed’s full pink heads.

Will they wait until I

get back?  8-20-13

I don’t know this bird.

Sounds a little like a rufous-sided towhee.

Let’s call him Morning Bird Who Sings in the Sea Air.  8-22-13

Between me and the pond

down there in the dense thicket,

there’s a cottontail and his kin.  8-23-13

When I go away from this balmy shore,

the sea oats will stay and hold my place.  8-23-13

This day belongs to mourning dove.

Repeating, he says so again.  8-25-13

More cicadas than

myrtle blossoms now.

One vibrates in the ear,

the other in the eye.  8-26-13

Nodding into the ground,

puccoon’s last yellow leaves

lean like sleepy pinwheels.  8-26-13

Above the white pines circling—vulture.

He sees me better than I see him and

he wonders about my pen.  9-3-13

The fading rosy lavendar that thinned out green.

That angle of yellow light.

They are all the end of something

the cool air carries away.  9-4-13

Look, there’s a catbird in the holly,

in a circle of sun.  He speaks softly.

I hear him.  9-4-13

So many days, books and libraries

soak up the hours. What choice?  

No choice.  9-11-13

Four geese overhead make an arm of a V.

They talk about it.  9-11-13

I’m feeling a little like columbine today,

yellowed and browned by the difficult summer.

Still upright on its stems, it is, though.  9-12-13

A round robin

of three families of noisy crows—

a circlet of crows?  9-14-13

Sieboldii’s one pink flower has a friend. 

And it has a mouth.

Well, a flower mouth.  10-31-13

Yellow sassafras and

cinnamon myrtle dance—

dark light, dark light, dark light.  10-31-13

I wrote it.  I sent it.  No surprise.

Let it be real in spite of everything.  11-10-13

Whose oak leaf fell in my hair?

A gift, a spinning gift

for the turning moment.  11-10-13