Birdsong
—Joanie Mackowski
Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat
rising from the new minted earth, granite
and basalt, proto-continents shuffling
and stacking the deck, first shadows flung
from the ultraviolet haze. A fern
uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace
of replication warms the world, one
becoming two, two four: exponential blossom.
Lush with collision, the teacup balance
of x and y, cells like balloons
escaping into the sky—then the dumbstruck
hour, unmoored by a river,
a first fish creeps to the land to marvel
at the monstrous buds of its toes. And stars
grow feet and walk across the years, into these dozing,
ordinary days, climbing the spine’s winding
stair, where crickets yawn and history spins.
Still Life with Three Bird’s Nests by Vincent van Gogh (on his 161st birthday).
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
—Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)
Space reaches from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.
It has no limits. Not till it is held
in your renouncing is it truly there.
