Hawks or vultures, even eagles spiral above

and land here; I don’t mean to slight the other birds,

but I name the grand ones first, then the crows who alight

in twos and threes and are bigger than they seem.

Their wings become my lashes lapping the white air

and its margins, they make the moment’s punctuation

and every minute of looking is a sentence to live.

Live, I say to the birds and myself, phrase by phrase!

Each day’s a winding paragraph but as a working man

I can say that the week is my main measure:

spreading my wings I touch Sunday to Sunday,

a great bird soaring the days of the week,

hunting for what’s warm and digestible,

sampling everything that fits my beak.

*

Another faux-sonnet; the more important formal aspect (the generator, really, or the mirror of my mind-waves) is the linking of sounds/words. And again, the matrix of the field I live in the middle of, and its social activities -- yes, I think by now I should refer to the animal denizenry and their doings as "social." I don't much else of a social life! They star in this poem, the birds, as themselves, and as me. The poem is essentially a spreading of the wings I don't have except in a poem.

Sowing My Voice

Scattering my voice everywhere, seeds for talking with new friends
I planted seeds for earlier, friends to replace the old ones long lost;
delicately watered and fed, friends in rows on vines and in brambles
with the softest spines that prick to interest, no blood, no hurt.
Talking springs up as blossoms of all sizes and hues, thoughtful, delightful,
all in one language though I have yet to learn it. The words
droop over my hand when I walk the field; some catch on my sleeve,
some sneak indoors with me in my cuffs and shoes.

I had words pressed like petals in books I would talk over with you,
friends cultivated far from here, in other worlds: words like family,
aging along with me, holding my place in lost books
that are ageless. Though the books are lost I remember
their most amazing passages; traces of every page I touched
travel upward in me like swirling snows. I close my eyes
even in summer and the snow is still falling, rising, settling;
then my eyes open and I see your faces. They are still young
and I see them vividly, hear voices, music and drunken laughter
when the light goes down into the rut the rains made;
the light goes down as if to drink the dregs of darkness,
but I stand looking a long time and the darkness prevails.

*

In form: fugal repetitions, concatenations of words/syllables. A central word or coloration in one phrase carries over to the next, and the whole thing is driven by a fairly even stress patten and accumulative grammar.

The field, my actual 4-acre property, that has (as mentioned before) been serving as a matrix for many poems lately. And I keep turning mournfully to the past, elegiac, or -- well, self-pitying, really. It's mainly a blues note: the sound patterns are far more interesting to me than the content, and I have been dabbling in this fugal mode so much lately, when I start into an exercise, it seems to write itself.