As it rains.
The depth of a dead bird's hollowed eye and bright feathers sodden and drowned in prismatic anti-freeze?
A zoomy arrested pathos: its beak gaped.
Over on its back, his belly feathered yellow, white, his crown a special wood pecker red, and black-checker black. What was I to do, foolish poet, failed short story writer, pissant, running on with one untied shoe, other than gently lift the dead *Melanerpes erythrocephalus* with a dishwasher's glove.
I must catalog to memory the mystic hue of its eye. I could say 'exaggerated pupil centered upon an almost illicit green-the green of the earliest leaf of-of a lamb's ear in 1952 when a child's hand pinched midday topsoil on the west side of a house, and then caressed minute white hair on an emergent bright green leaf.' That color green. The Red-headed Woodpecker's eye was something of an opalescent green beyond the limited descriptive prowess of this typist.
'show me a barrier, it makes me warier'
I surmise (the surprisingly near-weightlessness of it) broke its neck as it swooped beak first, proud, gentle, joyous, at full speed, (cantilevered) into the clean spring glass.
The reflected sky, not a care in the world, he thought.
***
off the
elevator
down the
glistened
floors
the electric
green machine
flat-lines
there is
the spank
of gangrene
an eye
forced closed
beneath the
rubbery thumb
and pointer
finger
as a poet cries
just,
new eyes
white light, sparkled
moist, starched
blue flannel,
bright blood
and oh!
coochie coo
my goodness!
the split rumba
of life,
the surgeon's
knife
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Sirenita Lake
Just Thinking...
ThroughMyEyes
Ute Sonnenberg
Steven Bridenbaugh
Marilyn Sands
Salon.com
Comments
and beyond
'i after e
accept after c'
or in the world
where the
"herder of adverbial adjectifed dangling gerunds"
and spliced commas
prowls
"arrested pathos"
stops one in his/her tracks
where saints and poets
bend and kneel to find the truth
of the thing itself studying
the mandala iris
of the world
where the red
of the red-winged blackbirds
wings is in contrast
to the yellow line
of feathers
lying on the road where
the red-winged blackbird
lies black
like onyx
What? You hit a red-winged blackbird with your Vespa?
Scarlett, you did mention a 'yellow line' and, prior to understanding the 'mandala iris' of your saintly, poetic response, I replied. The muse now compels an animated 'image' or developmental 'spark' toward 'story', some sort of 'throttle kick' startled by the tranquil meditative 'stasis' of the kaleidoscopic (Heidi Rand's work?) mandala iris out toward 'motion', 'flight' and 'finality' of happenstance.
The scripted prelude to the 'poem' is experimental and potentially aberrant in its tangential meanderings; I have edited since the original rendering.
'Dead Bird' proper unravels beneath the three asterisks.
Apparently the work alludes to reincarnation.
Usually times are brightened this time of year. Now there's a persistent rank of decay throughout the forest as though afflicted by the dry, near snowless winter. And then the righteous sweat of a March heatwave and now once again the relentless north wind howls autumn.
I see clusters of tulips tinged and withered.
While apple, cherry and magnolia show off well, but the huge, fundamental canopy trees, the ash and ancient oak, continue their refusal to really bloom--seemingly a shy, awkwardness--some type of austere rebellion.
Some type of telling of the birds.
Rita, thanks so!
All hands on deck for that big ballyhooed moon tonight! If I had serious coin I'd charter a helicopter and fly due east over Lake Michigan and live blog, film the moon as it rises! The beach will suffice if this baneful low ceiling lifts in time...
But since I was cheated out of my moon I played a little Dire Straits Money For Nothing with the eery Sting intro.
Where are you in the world? you are near a beach. Gawd. I have woods but no beach for miles and miles.
No book. Have never submitted a poem anywhere but here. You?
When you write your poems, I like to picture you and where the feelings come from, if where in the world you write them affects how you see things. When you wrote about the beach, I related to the flashlights and legs. And the bird. If he was found on a country road, or in the street of a large city or just a little walked on suburb pavement. Strange. Yes. But you already knew that.
I probably spelled piliated wrong.