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Poetry

The Birds: 4 Poems

written by Guest Contributor December 11, 2018

House Sparrow

The issuer of names is preoccupied with the next task.

Someone has to talk and someone
has to be talked to. Stories,

unlike names, are not inert. Everyone
wants for a story to take them

somewhere else. The idea of being transported,
of having the emotions reassigned, does not belong

to a house. The house is a confine.

Stories take up their first and second and third person.
In this case, resist the first — I wanted song.

A song is wild. Intrinsic to its nature
is the very principle of motion. But a house

is safe. It sinks roots, the color of which
pale with each sedentary hour.

 

 


Chickadee

The rule is
repeat after me. I say

say my name, say my name.

Only the self is knowable. Perhaps
that’s true. Reality

is the self and what it encounters,
an endless string of the first person.

I cannot know you.

You cannot love me. (Say your name. Say your name.) We are
a fetish, identifying and crying out

with little regard for what is at the end of the string.
Wasn’t it endless? Everything has an end, and is then

forgotten. Perhaps nothing is knowable.
A name is a prison.

 

 


Dark Eyed Junco

To the impatient onlooker
we are a series of the same figure:

it, it, it, it.

If there is protection in sameness, there is
also mystery. Where will

that one it be
at any one time. It is already

dissolving out of the picture
to become interchangeable with its own

idea. But a living thing is not an idea.
It too is lonely for a face. A face

writes its trouble onto itself. (The plural is
stories collected out of separation.)

If we commune, it is to save ourselves.

 

 


Bushtit

Emphasis will always remain
on the negative — the one problem

solved incorrectly. The converse, meaning
the good thing, is somehow expected.

We are the small, temporary good thing — our arrival
is unexpected. It shivers now

into focus. Be still. Consider
the sensation of wonder — is it only

a symptom of goodness? Perhaps good
is not a thing. Planned or unplanned, ultimately

it forms an act. But objects and their results
supersede action. This is why (something

lost is valuable) we must leave
before the eye can train its vision.

 

 


Laton Carter‘s Leaving (University of Chicago Press) was selected by Mark Doty for the Oregon Book Award. Recent work appears or is forthcoming from Iron Horse Literary Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, phoebe, and Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities. Carter’s poem The Starling was selected by Dan Beachy-Quick as the winner of the 2017 Winter Anthology Contest.

The Birds: 4 Poems was last modified: December 9th, 2018 by Guest Contributor
The Birds
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