Damn you, Thomas Eliot!
Why did you have to be a bigot?
Someday they’ll say, “Who? I forgot!”
At first it seemed a forgivable blot,
A line here and there, not a lot,
A silver string with a nasty knot.
Now it reads like an aneurism, a clot,
A stroke, or babble of a bibulous sot,
Unredeemable, no innocent mot,
But the crisis of your poetry’s plot.
Then you wrote the Four Quartets.
Your hate may be forgiven yet.
There is little left of his hip —
Afflicted since he was a pip
In a leg brace, he would trip
On the curb, crossing the street.
He’d never been strong or fleet.
The clouds followed him
Above oceans he could swim
With a few strokes of his arms,
Setting off foreign alarms.
The highest mountains bent
Upside down for his ascent.
Only he knew where he went.
It appeared beneath our yew,
A large puffball that grew
Unseen. Then there were two.
Soft, bleached skulls without holes,
Less like the dead than souls.
I picked them up — their spongy skin
As alarmingly soft as sin.
I was frightened of what grew within.
A man shot a magpie on the wing.
It fell with a broken wing.
The nock snapped the bow’s string.
The man gave the bird to a priest,
Who nursed it to be released,
Then decided to keep it in a cage.
To release its gale force outrage,
The priest split the magpie’s tongue,
Expecting to hear a terrible song.
Instead he heard nothing but words,
The speech of Man, not birds:
His own prayers and curses,
And profaned Biblical verses.
The altar boys taught the magpie
To ask of everyone, “Why
Weren’t you shot from the sky?”
The passing of years
As we enter the gray —
The shedding of tears
(Allowed only a day),
The mending of love —
Is below and above
The light and the dark,
A singing meadowlark
Whose eye can’t be seen
Through eyelid screens,
As the daylight retreats
And tomorrow repeats.
The derecho downed
Thousands of trees,
Two in my back yard.
Both fell on our house,
Toppling chimney,
Ripping down gutters,
Driving heavy branches
Through shingled roof.
One spearlike stem
Missed me as I slept,
By the width of my bed.
Water on me woke me,
Not the cracking sound.
It was close, but not soon
Enough to take me asleep.
The nuthatches and chickadees
Are here, but are never there.
No twig, no arm of a lawn chair,
(Nothing their little claws seize)
Remains a perch for long
In each bird’s pursuit of song.
In movement they find flying.
They cannot be still for trying.
They pause only for sustenance —
The suspension of cadence
Taking air from the vibrating beak.
That is a bird’s life — to seek.
