Boundaries
Three crows wobbling on their high perch
atop the tallest spruce, clucking
their croaking cackles amongst themselves,
have recently alighted from chasing off
a crow that didn’t fit in, and now they gossip
complacently in full confidence
they’ve secured all outposts of their empire,
and if they raucous up a little fuss
when we sally forth, it isn’t fearful hate
juicing up like with fishers and foxes
but just that they know we also think
we own everything, so if we yell
shuttup they’ll hear an acknowledgement
of sorts in it that keeps an old truce
between gatherers that ended
with farming and yet was learned in us
in that slow-steady proprioception
of being in which nature isn’t a school
teaching lessons like staking borders
for our minds, and so what looks like a law
that works between us when we work
in the woodlot but not in the fields
still works in our hic et nunc boundaries,
though if we consider, as Gospel
bids us do, what birds consider their spaces,
all and nothing according to scripture,
we wonder why the yellow warbler batters
against himself in the black windowpane
in such squeaking indignation
(where lie the lines of his domain?)
and, if looking up in a sudden silence
from roaring tillers or saws,
we could catch a glimpse of heaven
that surrounds us, if we could see.
atop the tallest spruce, clucking
their croaking cackles amongst themselves,
have recently alighted from chasing off
a crow that didn’t fit in, and now they gossip
complacently in full confidence
they’ve secured all outposts of their empire,
and if they raucous up a little fuss
when we sally forth, it isn’t fearful hate
juicing up like with fishers and foxes
but just that they know we also think
we own everything, so if we yell
shuttup they’ll hear an acknowledgement
of sorts in it that keeps an old truce
between gatherers that ended
with farming and yet was learned in us
in that slow-steady proprioception
of being in which nature isn’t a school
teaching lessons like staking borders
for our minds, and so what looks like a law
that works between us when we work
in the woodlot but not in the fields
still works in our hic et nunc boundaries,
though if we consider, as Gospel
bids us do, what birds consider their spaces,
all and nothing according to scripture,
we wonder why the yellow warbler batters
against himself in the black windowpane
in such squeaking indignation
(where lie the lines of his domain?)
and, if looking up in a sudden silence
from roaring tillers or saws,
we could catch a glimpse of heaven
that surrounds us, if we could see.
