Our Phoebes
At ramshackle gas and grocery stores
with BAIT written in magic marker
on brown cardboard taped to a fly-blown
front window you can pull in to wait in line
while a heavy-set woman chats up locals
buying lottery tickets, cigarettes and Pabst
two-packs, of course, and to purchase
a Styrofoam coffee cup of mealy worms
that will curl and wiggle on an open palm
you out-hold to half-tame your phoebes
that return each March to cozy niches
our houses provide. But we don’t do
what you do. Our phoebes snap their bills
in dismay when the oil man lugs a hose
fat as a python under the deck, rasps off
the steel cap and clanks the nozzle
into the pipe, and then clicks at a bic
to fire a cigar as he waits next to the gurgle
for a finishing whistle. Our phoebes
must sally down from outflung twigs
and telephone wires to snatch what bugs
might be fluttering or beetling about
for no apparent reason in this universe
of necessary causes that in late autumn
tells all our phoebes to disappear for Mexico
with no sweet words of farewell,
when sturdy carpenters will drill up boards
on our rotting deck, crumbling down
the exquisite cups the phoebes wrought,
year after year, and as sweating workers
strip to their tank-tees under October sun
we agree to see SEMPER FI inked into skin
as faith in a necessary myth of return.
with BAIT written in magic marker
on brown cardboard taped to a fly-blown
front window you can pull in to wait in line
while a heavy-set woman chats up locals
buying lottery tickets, cigarettes and Pabst
two-packs, of course, and to purchase
a Styrofoam coffee cup of mealy worms
that will curl and wiggle on an open palm
you out-hold to half-tame your phoebes
that return each March to cozy niches
our houses provide. But we don’t do
what you do. Our phoebes snap their bills
in dismay when the oil man lugs a hose
fat as a python under the deck, rasps off
the steel cap and clanks the nozzle
into the pipe, and then clicks at a bic
to fire a cigar as he waits next to the gurgle
for a finishing whistle. Our phoebes
must sally down from outflung twigs
and telephone wires to snatch what bugs
might be fluttering or beetling about
for no apparent reason in this universe
of necessary causes that in late autumn
tells all our phoebes to disappear for Mexico
with no sweet words of farewell,
when sturdy carpenters will drill up boards
on our rotting deck, crumbling down
the exquisite cups the phoebes wrought,
year after year, and as sweating workers
strip to their tank-tees under October sun
we agree to see SEMPER FI inked into skin
as faith in a necessary myth of return.
