Villanelle with a Line Borrowed from Muriel Rukeyser
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
I am polishing the stones of my demise.
A hummingbird parses an old cherry branch.
I listen to stones, to cheeping birds.
I’m not articulate, or wise.
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Silence hums with birdsong overheard.
It’s the muses—whatever they are—I apotheosize.
A hummingbird parses an old cherry branch.
In my time, our world will not be cured.
The stones are mute, and so am I.
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Is the muse a being imagined or conjured?
In the rubble of wanton war—too hard to cry.
A hummingbird parses an old cherry branch.
There are thirteen ways to look at a blackbird,
a thousand ways to wonder why.
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
A hummingbird parses an old branch.
The Dodo
It was ours to club and eat,
to herd onto vessels that offloaded
rats, pigs, cats, monkeys. The dodo
was fast, agile, flightless, a turkey-sized
dove that foraged on a single Indian Ocean
island, Mauritius—rhymes with delicious.
When approached by starving sailors,
it froze. In one day, 50 could be clubbed
to death. By 1662, the dodo was done for.
It had evolved from a bird that could fly,
that flew from island to island. No predators.
With plenty of fruit, it grew heavy, lost flight.
Dumb as a dodo? For 12 million years,
it thrived in its forest of ebony, palm,
and bamboo. We have roamed Earth a mere
300,000 years. To quote one of our species—
Most of us feel that we could never go
extinct. The dodo felt that way too.
The Poet’s Kitchen
In the old kitchen, she writes
on a tacky sheet of notebook paper,
tacky meaning sticky, said of ink
back in her years in the printing trade.
The tack of this sheet taking its ink
recollects the bond among printers
printing in the windowless printshop.
Press operators working ten-hour shifts
barely speaking to be heard in the din,
so deep was their mutual ken. The older
printers all long dead. Memory’s
a museum: the steep stair down which
100-pound cartons of stock must
be lowered, the jokes and chat, coffee
and donut before the shift revs up,
the whack of paper cutter, chunk
of printing press, sweet odor of solvent.
Here now, this kitchen has its cookstove,
cast-iron skillet, stewpot, tools
of a different trade. Oilcloth printed
with apples, grapes, and cherries. Her old age
is replete with time to gaze out a window
at a windy November day, its flurry
of black clouds, yellow leaves, crows.