Bird
1.
The great stalks are alert, their
shambles piled: maybe another parade.
An evident gray, a slow march
and legions, expectant. A rudderless, ordinary flow.
These none of them quite real, none present,
like mischief in a dream: the blue garment, the rusty blade.
Came late or have you come late or are you, you are late
then on into wakened sobriety’s itch.
The great stalks move slightly. They press back.
The waiting folds itself upward into a shape
to be seen later, or not seen, not now, not later.
Take hold of this garment, this was said.
The thrust of these injunctions. Take hold of the blade.
2.
Stepping man is stiff in the shade.
Let him be, or chop him down.
At the far side of the miserable hill
an orchestra is rehearsing for the factory’s ball.
The wheels peel off into global dust
and there is flesh, naked flesh, exposed to it.
Where were you? asks stepping man.
Where are we? you answer, taking shelter.
In the other, invisible mode I glimpsed him
walking away, toward the river, into a meadow.
The head of stepping man is bowed. He
seems to be alone in history, alone in the brush.
3.
Stepping man : cowed, immobile, an
invention of the nude season; an invention of
new arrivals and the one tulip and
beating of the woman with a baseball bat.
He stepped on her face.
Hear these enactments
or forego them in their temporal settings.
The material of the world? Will?
How the Jesuit and the young woman
might have walked along an avenue in 1960
and then, this long, this far away
in the tangle of the bare, emergent copse.
Stepping man recalls Thoreau and is envious.
4.
Drab us; lonely sequitor. Stepping man, distilled,
no more than a fake. Quaint acquisition, no
more than material fiction
to see or not to see. He
cannot look up, and the light
drifts across his shoulders
as the river slinks on to curse
his rigid stride:
New York, Albany, Troy, then
night and the music he might have known.
Stepping man, burning ash, the bird’s
quick target --- carries the sky on its back.