Birds at the Door

The blackbirds and crows
line up in murders,
on the telephone wires, suspended
over pastures and prairies;
how the storms rise up from our lips
the histories of making memories
into tragic lovers' quarrels, making
night into morning just by
staying up
to watching the witching hours
roll by the two lights
of the dusk and the solitary
black in the middle of twelve,
just after the clock turns over
into new calendars, new
gods and gurus, intentions and Mercuries
the planet, not the thermostat rising,
obscuring my turquoise and silvery
retrograde. the angle
of the shaft
the wheat and the chaff, a field
of quixotic murmurings.
Then your voice in my hair,
the stubble  of your words
on my mouth, your hand
at my throat
using those kitchen shears,
to peel back the years of mummified
calcification; didn't you know?
I was made to make this.
I will sing blackbird songs,
of thrushes and swallows
and first ovums, first mornings,
and subtle smiling conceptions,
those first meek flutterings,
and the millstone, where the
flower becomes bread risen.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

The wise and learned Jack has pretty much summed it up as "gorgeous and mysterious"; the birds that "line up in murders", "quixotic murmers", words that are "stubble", the disquieting image of "your hand/at my throat", the final image of the millstone, which crushes, yet leads to creation. Suffice it to say that I wish I had written this piece.

[LJW]

Beautiful. Your work is awe inspiring.

[Emily B]

pure poetic genius, you make it look so easy, I wish that it were so!!!

[Doctor JKC]

"how the storms rise up from our lips"
A genius line that stood out among many.

Gorgeous and mysterious.
Jack