Robins and Grubs
Where snow turned grainy and melted
then gray lips of ice receded, robins
are tearing aside flocculent detritus,
sodden maple and apple leaves ready to rot.
Thrashing with their beaks, they uncover
white grubs curled like fetuses in new mud,
glowing corpse-white half-moons, soft
but only looking sticky. I’m only knowing
these worms, never to become beetles,
in my mind, not seeing them as I do see
robins I’m watching through a window,
yet also seeing a raven wobble across
a gray, gritty snowbank better than I do
other robins I see only when brown clumps
of leaves toss up mysteriously on the lawn.
Because robins are so always around us
we might see one first comer in spring
and then we see them without seeing them,
like how prophets preach the truth
with stories so minds that see must look
to see it where it isn’t said. Window lulling
thus, I put my mind to the mind of the raven
strutting about cocking its head, guessing
it must be more curious about sky
and dirt than the robins who seem to know
only one thing they’re doing at a time.
Grubs, though, who become several beings
in one if no one eats them, live mindless
beyond time, only eating and being
in a timelessness, like the far universe
beyond the galaxies or deep inside atoms
where place and particle meld. This shudder
I shake from me as I turn from reverie
neither birds nor grubs can share.
then gray lips of ice receded, robins
are tearing aside flocculent detritus,
sodden maple and apple leaves ready to rot.
Thrashing with their beaks, they uncover
white grubs curled like fetuses in new mud,
glowing corpse-white half-moons, soft
but only looking sticky. I’m only knowing
these worms, never to become beetles,
in my mind, not seeing them as I do see
robins I’m watching through a window,
yet also seeing a raven wobble across
a gray, gritty snowbank better than I do
other robins I see only when brown clumps
of leaves toss up mysteriously on the lawn.
Because robins are so always around us
we might see one first comer in spring
and then we see them without seeing them,
like how prophets preach the truth
with stories so minds that see must look
to see it where it isn’t said. Window lulling
thus, I put my mind to the mind of the raven
strutting about cocking its head, guessing
it must be more curious about sky
and dirt than the robins who seem to know
only one thing they’re doing at a time.
Grubs, though, who become several beings
in one if no one eats them, live mindless
beyond time, only eating and being
in a timelessness, like the far universe
beyond the galaxies or deep inside atoms
where place and particle meld. This shudder
I shake from me as I turn from reverie
neither birds nor grubs can share.
