Nothing Personal
A thrasher begins a pecking fight
with a towhee, but after a few flurried darts
and feints they unfluff to strut
around each other, bobbing up seeds.
But this is all about me, and nothing
about birds, except for a faint curiosity
if bird brain thinking in such situations
of ordinary extremity resembles mine--
scooting out onto a furious interstate,
or discovering myself emplaced across
a dinner table from a chirpy poet,
for instance. No witness; just stuck in it.
This morning when bindweed trumpets
blazed so white in the roadside mass
that I stopped to snatch off a tangle of vine
to see what might blossom at home,
trucks screamed by so close they blew over
my travel mug and rolled my lit flashlight
down the gravel shoulder. They seemed enraged
with me, and as the day bloomed open
it became clear that a searing sting
on my hand came not from the foreign devil
weed called mile-a-minute, but a spider
had seized me in the dark. No malevolence;
the truth is darker. I just don’t matter.
At the window stroking my molten arm
I bear witness to a chipmunk filling fat jowls
with millet and milo, ignored by a wren
who knows perfectly well it might later
sneak up a bush to eat her eggs. My hand
prickles and pulses like passion today
though my soul sits sullen as gray dishwater
scumming the sink, as personal as death
lying heavy in a once warm womb.
with a towhee, but after a few flurried darts
and feints they unfluff to strut
around each other, bobbing up seeds.
But this is all about me, and nothing
about birds, except for a faint curiosity
if bird brain thinking in such situations
of ordinary extremity resembles mine--
scooting out onto a furious interstate,
or discovering myself emplaced across
a dinner table from a chirpy poet,
for instance. No witness; just stuck in it.
This morning when bindweed trumpets
blazed so white in the roadside mass
that I stopped to snatch off a tangle of vine
to see what might blossom at home,
trucks screamed by so close they blew over
my travel mug and rolled my lit flashlight
down the gravel shoulder. They seemed enraged
with me, and as the day bloomed open
it became clear that a searing sting
on my hand came not from the foreign devil
weed called mile-a-minute, but a spider
had seized me in the dark. No malevolence;
the truth is darker. I just don’t matter.
At the window stroking my molten arm
I bear witness to a chipmunk filling fat jowls
with millet and milo, ignored by a wren
who knows perfectly well it might later
sneak up a bush to eat her eggs. My hand
prickles and pulses like passion today
though my soul sits sullen as gray dishwater
scumming the sink, as personal as death
lying heavy in a once warm womb.
