after Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking…”
- A blackbird flew off the garden wall.
- Duly impoverished wall!
Full acquittal? Or the blackbird’s fury/flurry left—
to contend
with?
- Once
a blackbird sparked such a quarrel with me
and I lost from claw and resist,
to a more singular tongue/
sparring mind.
- Where silence is grave human plea—
that a blackbird would torture the air so sweetly!
- Who would not exult
at the blackbird’s annihilation of me—
trash-talking me
both well and good
from the privy of my own backyard?
- Once an old man
stepped off the tenantry road
and into our yard (also) with his toes splayed.
As if all his life
he must flex the spirit
of a blackbird
against another man’s cruel
intentions—
a foot-soldier in the heading
of pingwing,
chairman in the plaiting.
- Once—
and no mother about—
I grew such a penchant for the blackbird’s blue
incandescent verbs!
- How many years and the sky
still on shore leave?
Between epoch darkness
and the sun—
how many blackbirds would it take
to ring-in the dew-dawn?
- I hear the blackbird
suck his teeth,
shredding any and all faulty syllogisms
wrought in his name.
- See how the blackbird
fixes his eye on his own daily/ideally worm!
- Although—
what is home/hope
without an outdoor kitchen?
A blackbird watching
my great-grandmother
stoke the fire
from a forked breadfruit limb
(and not just for the soup-sake
of conversation)—
smoke curling up to heaven?
- I will not begrudge your eyes
I will not scorn
your piercing blackbird cries
for that might eclipse
one’s own legitimacy—
epidemiology
of my own straw-song and wit.
- Who would not know
the blackbird’s tart joy and tremulous
irony?
It is mostly golden apples, mangoes—
early-birding
upon the aegis
of my own sound wings.