Your Hand Please. Let's Walk.

Your Hand, Please. Let’s Walk.

  52 Poems by Charles Hibbard

  Copyright 2013 Charles Hibbard

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  I. Animals

  Animal Care and Control

  For a moment he’s a mythical beast

  flying the pavement upside down,

  as though heaven had hardened

  to concrete. But the world has just

  rolled over him, this pigeon,

  panting, helpless on the street

  and blinking a fearful eye.

  I watch him, tense as a cat,

  mesmerized by the futile

  white flag of his underwings.

  Finally I strike,

  seize him in my claws,

  pop him in my paper sack.

  Now he’s still, waiting in the dark.

  What else can we do?

  Compassion, drawn too tight,

  would unravel our world.

  But maybe it won’t be noticed

  if I carry him to a place

  where people paid to care

  can add him to a database,

  and not kill him till I’m gone.

  Bark

  When threatened

  the brown creeper spreads his wings

  and flattens against a trunk

  vanishes, becomes his beloved bark.

  The rest of the time he forages

  spiralling up a tree and snacking

  then snapping down in a small puff of wings

  to start over again

  or slings his hammock of needles and silk

  behind the rough wall of bark

  and dozes through the short summer nights.

  When, for its own reasons,

  the wind lifts and grows

  in the crowns of the pines

  the creeper is home in that dark moan.

  Blinking

  he settles deeper in his narrow room.

  Co-evolution

  Of our two species,

  their fates so long entwined,

  only one invented dynamite.

  Thus Warden Davis

  and the snow below the pines

  tiled with stunned crows:

  flogged like black laundry

  with bats and sticks

  then piled on sleighs

  and dragged off for burning,

  or found after miles and days

  nose down in drifts.

  Three hundred and twenty-eight

  thousand, before the Warden’s fist

  dropped away from its plunger.

  And still the crows

  keep coming, on somber wings,

  in twos and fours, a slow

  cortege of bombers shadowing

  the plain of spotless snow.

  Fire

  As though water had never boiled,

  this year’s wrens

  build their homes by the dogged stream

  flattering its doings with sound.

  Warblers loop and light like harmless coals

  in the flicker of a few lucky leaves

  (aren’t flames always green?)

  while frantic swallows

  bank and swerve on this year’s breeze

  stitching that lucid cloth

  as though air could never fray.

  This year’s birds in fact

  know nothing of last year’s.

  They perch on the bones of martyred trees

  and hail the blistered ground

  as though heaven this year were gray.

  Golden-Crowned Kinglet II

  Kinglets are as close to an annual bird (in analogy with annual plants

  that regenerate each year only by seeds) as any bird gets. . .

  any adversity can affect them in the wild, where 87 percent of the population

  is on average weeded out every year.

  -Bernd Heinrich, Winter World

  What a blessing on these winter nights,

  to bed down whenever you please!

  To brush your teeth and tour your rooms

  snipping off the yellow blooms of light,

  to lower the heat to 60 degrees

  set your clock to flag down the dawn,

  and crawl beneath the covers

  and huddle up with someone warm.

  In the winter woods, there can be 60 degrees

  of frost. The hurrying kinglets,

  slowed and driven down by twilight, bind

  in fragile balls, beneath what snowy roofs

  they can find, of branch or root,

  and surrender to the dark, half sheltered

  from the stooping freeze.

  There at last they close their eyes

  and in their deepest feathers

  tuck their heads to dream

  and shiver, and await

  the nightly sentence of the weather.

  Hatch

  Little wet creatures

  fresh from their shells;

  whatever are they,

  and where did they come from?

  No matter.

  They seem to know me,

  to have some claim,

  to assume a future.

  Clustered at my side

  they make a raft

  of trembling down.

  It narrows every day –

  dwindling numbers

  traded for secrecy

  among the reeds.

 

  And if those trends

  should meet at zero?

  Luckily I can’t count

  beyond one; and so far

  at least one of something

  there still is.

  War Horses

  Horses and brother equines

  soft-eyed stolid pullers

  swayback, lashed and galled,

  who are you working for now?

  For you, this should have been

  over long ago; but here you are

  again, belly up by the road

  or trudging through the stink

  of diesel and cordite,

  the dead weight of our

  history still dragging on your

  sagging collarbones.

  One more time you have to

  lower your heads and pull,

  one more stretch of steppe

  like all the others; one whip

  is much like another

  and you’ve done this

  so many times before.

  But, horses, take heart!

  This is your last war.

  After this there will be only

  green pastures and shade

  a sleepy friend or two,

  a token fence

  to hang your head over

  and watch the cars

  whipping by with those

  who live and die in them.

  Lost Warbler

  That day every flag stood out stiff,

  straining north, as the first

  winter storm spun

  down October’s spine,

  rim fat with rain and wind.

  Far at sea a lost fleck

  of August, blown off

  that wheel, sank on failing wings

  toward the gray net of water.

  In my thoughts now

  I still hold him aloft,

  though his story was already told

  by the time our own little boat

  turned toward safety, sea-rolled

  and pounded, but kept afloat

  by some unearned mercy.

  E
ncounter

  What are you doing out here

  circling and rolling in the dust

  of this well traveled trail

  like a frantic black/brown

  velvet glove paddling

  with huge pale hands

  against the gripless air?

  Lost blind miner

  how lucky for both of us

  that you met me and not

  one of the ruthless terriers

  who patrol this path

  in the nominal control

  of humans.

  I recall my long gone mother

  her own rescued mole calmly

  stretched on her palm as though he’d

  rediscovered his parlor.

  I’ll do my best for you

  but unlike her I remain

  a worn tread on the tire of being

  still breaded in the dust of desire

  and barely fit to lift you squirming

  to the cover of the weeds

  and watch you disappear.

  The Religion of Sparrows

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

  –Joan Didion

  The sleeping sparrows smolder

  like banked embers

  through the long nights

  and awaken depleted,

  shivering.

  But in the mornings

  before anything else

  they have to talk.

  Giddy as teens

  they twitter over each other

  as though the dark were a vortex

  they’ve narrowly escaped.

  Do they talk

  teleology?

  death and life?

  love and loss?

  They talk about

  the rain overnight

  who fell the day before

  the shadow of a hawk.

  They mock the pigeons

  and praise the sun.

  Finally they eat.

  Snapshot of an Eternal Verity

  We’ve seen that cat before!

  Complacent cynosure!

  In the chocolate mask

  the eyes are aglow,

  fired by the Brownie flash.

  Look how he fits the decor,

  that slacker Siamese,

  stretched on the 1950s

  creamy wall-to-wall:

  the tail, at ease,

  curled at the tip,

  and the extended forepaws draw

  a long diagonal on the floor,

  aimed at the underside

  of a pallid armchair

  and one middle-aged foot

  in a pointed turquoise flat.

  Defocus your gaze:

  couldn’t that be Cleopatra’s

  brown foot in the blue shoe?

  Now you’re free to raise

  an older world around that

  overstuffed throne:

  temple or palace, pillar and palm,

  feluccas on a lazy river

  drifting down the desert air.

  And there, smirking

  on the limestone floor,

  the same self-satisfied cat.

  Late August

  Clumps of thistledown tilting

  downwind on a leisure breeze

  nudged free by the soft

  the puffy lemon-breasted

  goldfinches who bury their faces

  in that plush and nuzzle

  and feel, barely bother

  to eat, so sure of those seeds

  so drunk with sun and heat and

  late summer.

  If Turtles Could Fly

  In the Age of Heroes

  hawks flying over Delphi

  dropped turtles from the heights

  to smash their shells –

  the humble earth-brown

  reptiles briefly airborne

  perhaps daring to trust

  in metamorphosis

  for the few delirious

  moments of flight

  before their illusions

  splintered on sacred ground.

  Used Finch

  After the winter rains

  what remains is a warp

  of sketchy bones, all

  at cross purposes,

  fluff that fans and falls

  with every puff of wind,

  sprung springs

  from silenced clockwork,

  an obtuse splay of claws

  with nothing left to hold.

  Today a hummingbird

  hangs above that mess,

  green as inspiration,

  looking to feather its nest;

  stares, ponders, selects,

  intuiting new wings

  in the ragpile of old.

  II. History

  Uta-napishti

  I’m telling you, the moon is in eclipse, and the gods have insomnia.

  They’re very restless, impatient with your workouts and your healthy diet.

  They’ve taken to mocking you with margarine and day-old bread.

  They dress you in ironic rags from the Salvation Army.

  Nowadays they won’t even waste their divine breath advising you.

  Watch yourself! You work overtime every day, and what have you got?

  You wear yourself out razing forests and jumping oceans

  while behind you your griefs keep piling up.

  You drive your short life to a premature end,

  peeling rubber toward the very thing you flee.

  And while you lie all night like an entitled stone,

  something silent walks your street, snapping off the parking meters.

  Yes, you are a human being! A man, or maybe a woman.

  Do you think there’s ever been a pair of eyes that could stare down the sun?

  Honestly, how long have you been renovating your kitchen?

  How long have you collected invoices in drawers?

  How many times have you rewritten your will?

  And for how many springs now has the river swelled and spilled seaward,

  dotted with drifting mayflies?

  Sappho’s Moon and Ours

  A poet in those days could hear tales

  Pillars of Hercules Mountains of the Moon

  deserts forests other seas

  sails flashing early sun

  doubling misty capes and gone.

  No need to gray those dreams with

  Shanghai Dubai New York.

  A mite in a flowerpot she could stroll her garden

  in the joy of lost love she could write:

  When the moon grows full and drapes

  her silver skirts o’er all the earth

  or words to that effect.

  Over all the earth: all

  the empty seas

  rolling empty steppes the clockless poles

  one night cloud beyond the planet’s curve.

  She might have dreamed

  the lunar skirts draped over all that

  silent gauze extending

  to calm the beaded grass.

  In those days you could.

  Annals of Human Ingenuity: Famagusta

  If you’re interested in process

  you might be wondering which seam

  the artisan opened first – was it

  dorsal or perhaps along the side;

  and did he work around the trunk,

  as you might a birch, or sensuously

  peel down that bloody hide,

  like stripping April long johns?

  Do you suppose

  the captive’s skin crawled

  as he saw it stuffed with straw?

  Did he feel a raw gale

  across his soul while they jogged

  his envelope (minus ears and nose)

  on the uncomprehending cow?

  And what of the faceless pasha

  who decreed those festivities?

  Certainly we know him well –

  his honest lust and simple joy

  in choo
sing from the bag of tricks

  on hand to school one’s foes;

  and how sweet, in lieu of a transcript

  of his own famous deeds, to deploy

  those simple agonies

  that travel down the years.

  Mrs. Roentgen

  She doesn’t think she wants to lay her hand

  under her husband’s new rays.

  It’s a young-looking hand, slim and smooth;

  he wants to shoot something through it.

  But she can’t doubt him. He has the eyes of a man

  who is exactly what he seems to be.

  You won’t feel anything, he says. I’ve already done this,

  and you see I’m still here.

  She lays her pale hand on the plate.

  You may leave your ring on, he says

  (as she has for twenty-three years).

  The room is dark, but he knows his way

  among all the tubes and coils.

  She hears him moving, adjusting,

  with confident hands.

  Time passes; anxiety turns to boredom.

  When will you start?

  I’ve just finished. He lifts the blind

  and sunlight clears the dark.

  Her hand looks just the same; the diamond

  sparks in the sudden light.

  It is the same. But the same is something new.

  A few minutes later he shows her.

  On the wet plate his new vision has burned away

  the soft flesh of her hand.

  Inside it lives . . . a spider,

  a spindly crab burrowed into black mud,

  Or a silent detonation, whose streamers climb

  curving from the white crater of her wrist.

  On the third bone from the right, the wedding stone

  glows like a tumor.

  Your hand will go down in history, he tells her.

  They go to dinner,

  halfway through their time together.

  Works in Progress

  To William Carlos Williams

  Nov. 1, 1933

  he wrote,

  as though today

  I were to write

  May 4, 2011,

  and free meaning

  immediately began

  to gather

  around those numbers

  like dust drifting

  in the lee

  of a dead farmhouse

  like fear itself, like

  lines

  of downcast men

  idling in strips of winter

  sunshine,

  luggage piling up

  on deserted platforms,