Voices for Birds

 

as long as Grand Island
shall faithfully keep
the commanded Post

thru hectoring Words
and hard Blows
Salmon, or Sturgeon shall swim

Cattel
shall be fed
with the grass                            [Samuel Sewell]

__________

free and harmless Doves
the fat of the land

Millions upon Millions
as if the Ayerie regiment had beene Pigeons

darkened the skies
w/ neyther beginning nor ending
length, or breadth

ended Cincinnati Zoo 1914

__________

remember
to give the rows
of Indian Corn
their education, by Pairs

__________

The richness of the intervals...
It will be Grass-ground River

fenced out humans
plover eggs survive

so they continued
for foure or five houres together

__________

get thee a prayer booth
in the wildernesse

just stare and stare
courses of rivers

folds of mountains
and skirts of hills

where the roads, canyons
valleys and tops of peaks

connect to the navel
center of the village

go in head first, learn
the territory

come back to see the whole
land a map of the land

__________

“a natural reproduction of France
with its mountains, its great rivers
its seas, its islands, its vegetal productions,
its canals, its cities, and so on”

a miniature model
of the path of the Yang-Tze
and Yellow Rivers,
including the Great Sea,
found in the tomb
of Shih Huang-Ti (d. 210 B.C.)

in the model train pavilion
vets at the State Fair
in coveralls and engineers' caps
waving semaphores

__________

who flies
with their eyes
on the sky

I fly
with my eyes
on the land

and open the little volume
small in size, but infinitely sweet

“And men admire
the high mountains
and the mighty waves
and the sweep of rivers
and the sound of the ocean
and the movement of stars,
and abandon themselves”                    [Petrarch]

by a canal outside the walls
in the country
under the plow

to turn the eye inward
not a syllable past my lips

 

 

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