Caterpillar

October 15, 2012

Caterpillar

Caterpillar, you are full of thought:

as every day you crawl across the leaves,

you traverse the pages of the world

and notice everything.  I find you pacing,

tracing lines across the supple skin

of apple blossoms in the delicate spring,

with each slow step remembering their design.

You overlook no detail, miss no trait:

no beautiful thing ever escapes your gaze.

Then at the end, you shed your final skin

to reveal the inevitable chrysalis beneath.

gone, the careful movement of your eyes,

the strange off-rhythm of your tiny steps

as you dissolve into a mess of cells

and then emerge, condemned to chase the sky.

I drag this tired body through the day

with bones that ache and creak, dissatisfied.

an ancient winged thing I have become,

so blind, so distant from the lovely earth.

Birdsong

September 30, 2012

Birdsong

I open my window to let in the morning.

Beyond the sill, the birds bring on daylight, their wings

shining in the sunrise. Sparrows here, sparrows there,

flying in flocks with such mathematical grace, such

lovely arithmetic: tessellating in mid-

air, geometric shapes.Their pitched sounds follow them,

too musical to be language, too deliberate

to be song. What instinct could be so intricate?

One small winged thing lands delicately in front

of me, tilts its head, and chirps. Surprised, I reply,

but my concave mouth is shaped wrong, and the air ca-

tches on my teeth. I blink. The sparrow calls again.

My voice searches for sounds as sweet, but suddenly

I am tone-deaf against such perfect pitch. I try

to mimic in english, then spanish, maybe some

mandarin, but I can’t seem to get the notes right,

throat too complex to sing as purely as pan pipes,

too old to learn these melodic oscillations.

Little bird, little bird, perched on my window: as

you twitter and trill, what riddles do you tell, with

your ambisyllabic sonorants? What sonnets

do you spout, with their jumps, leaps, and resolutions?

Brown bird, you take off and familiarity

dissolves like a fog clearing; each wingbeat reveals

a glittering, alien scene,

                                        a strange new sun

rising on a foreign country, a foreign world.