Crows are back, Carrack Carrack

The great phalanxes of autumn slipped back unheralded until today,

now they make the aspen tremble, with their heavy bodies, strident calls.

 

Silent  magpies assemble, white chests still gleaming with the rime of winter,

watching these noisy posers, who carried spring home on sleek black wings.

Spring is back, Carrack Carrack

 

Eye, Fly, Awry in this Landscape of Words,

They say don’t feed the birds, you encourage

dependence, promote non-native species.

who knew, it seemed such a harmless lark.

And what is the result of my two week vacation,

starvation throughout Brentwood stretching to

Dalhousie and Charlewood, or is it more widespread.

They do fly after all and we go through a lot of seed,

will they be dropping in Shanghai and Topeka,

and if not mass starvation, perhaps delinquency.

The whole of bird society breaking down, begging,

sexual license, belling cats, downing power lines

pushing each other into the air intakes of jets.

Or could it be positive, native species returning

Bluebirds, Martins sundry Warblers all jostling

wildly for the vacant nesting boxes and bird baths.

Maybe we should think big, Passenger Pigeons,

Carolina Parakeets, Labrador Ducks, who knows

what these misplaced Weaver Birds were up to.

Maybe we will see the great brown spurts of Bison

moving out of the river valleys with their attendant

packs of Grey Wolves and lumbering Plains Grizzlies.

And if I stop feeding the sleek Black Squirrels

that hang like misshapen fruit from my feeders,

what can I get for that?

                                                                                      Guy

                                                                     

Carving A Bufflehead

Sitting here on a hard wooden chair in my room at the Capri Centre, It looks like the wind is rising and I see lightning in the distance,

I am restless for home.

Riffling through things I could be doing there, I remember books, errands, projects and a small wooden duck now long gone,

can I carve another?

I have done it before, so no doubt it should rise a small winged shape whirling up from the turbulent surface of my mind,

has it been there all along?

No longer than my hand, a small black blemish from the black paint of the eye staining the clean basswood of the head,

enshrined now in a coat of vanish.

Is it there, the person I was still buried in the person I became, can I reclaim that person with each stroke of the rasp on the same blond

wood that gave that other bird life,

I want, I need to summon back that small delicate migrant, to float once more a calm still shape in my mind

can it find its way back?

Carrying  on its wings the feathers and pinions of not just one me but all the selves  that loved white pelicans floating in a northern river,

drumming grouse at dawn.

What will it carry, what will I receive, the sound of marbles,  the smell of chalk brushes, snapping kites against a blue sky, frustration, longing, joy.

A lot of freight for one small bird.

About Face

For each small sad thought, another.

Late summer, young magpies gather in the yard

pulling frantically at the tags on the shrubs.

Two crows perch on the skyward 4x4s

the barcodes are treasures beyond price.

A pine siskin runs joyously through the yard

collides with a blade of grass, down then up.

                                                                 Guy