i love dead bird poems

Michael Dennis Browne

2010-03-27T21:21:00.003-05:00

The Dead Bear

O bear

In your mortuary of wind!

You hang & swing
from your teeth from the cord
from the pole from the tree

O never hang me like this black
bear in Minnesota, will you

Hung, four days & nights,
hardened

Two logs jammed there
keep your belly open to dry

2

In the forest the wolves run
their fluent packs,
I cannot handle them

But you
as the snow falls
I can come to you

O bear
as the ice clamps the lake now
& moon walks on the whiteness
I can come to you
where you hang
between two trees

& as other living
stand & sniff
stand in harmony like horses

I can reach to you
Rap, rap
I can bang on you
as I could not
when you moved & lived
I can touch you

only in death

as only in death
I can touch so many more

Browne, Michael Dennis. The Wife of Winter. New York: Scribner's and Sons, 1970. 114-115.

Robinson Jeffers

2010-02-24T10:08:00.005-06:00

Birds and Fishes

Every October millions of little fish come along the shore,
Coasting this granite edge of the continent
On their lawful occasions: but what a festival for the sea-fowl.
What a witches' sabbath of wings
Hides the dark water. The heavy pelicans shout "Haw!" like Job's
     friend's warhorse
And dive from the high air, the cormorants
Slip their long black bodies under the water and hunt like wolves
Through the green half-light. Screaming, the gulls watch,
Wild with envy and malice, cursing and snatching. What hysterical
     greed!
What a filling of pouches! the mob
Hysteria is nearly human—these decent birds!—as if they were finding
Gold in the street. It is better than gold,
It can be eaten: and which one in all this fury of wild-fowl pities the
     fish?
No one certainly. Justice and mercy
Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor
     eternal God.
However—look again before you go.
The wings and wild hungers, the wave-worn skerries,
     the bright quick minnows
Living in terror to die in torment—
Man's fate and theirs—and the island rocks and immense ocean
     beyond, and Lobos
Darkening above the bay: they are beautiful?
That is their quality: not mercy, not mind, not goodness, but the
     beauty of God.

cited: Jeffers, Robinson. "Birds and Fishes." The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy. New York: Norton, 2005. 1323-1324.

Denise Levertov

2010-02-19T21:53:00.001-06:00

Crow Spring

The crows are tossing themselves
recklessly in the random winds
of spring.
One friend has died, one disappeared
(for now, at least) leaving no address;
I've lost the whereabouts
of a wandering third. This seems to be,
this year, the nature of the season.
Is it a message about relinquishment?
Across the water, rain's veil, gray silk,
flattens the woods to two dimensions.
While close at hand
the crows' black fountain
jets and falls, jets and blows
this way and that.
How they scoop themselves
up from the airy nadirs!

Levertov, Denise. Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 2002. 193.

Louise Glück

2010-02-08T21:29:00.002-06:00

Hunters

A dark night--the streets belong to the cats.
The cats and whatever small thing they find to kill--
The cats are fast like their ancestors in the hills
and hungry like their ancestors.

Hardly any moon. So the night's cool--
no moon to heat it up. Summer's on the way out
but for now there's still plenty to hunt
though the mice are quiet, watchful like the cats.

Smell the air--a still night, a night for love.
And every once in a while a scream
rising from the street below
where the cat's digging his teeth into the rat's leg.

Once the rat screams, it's dead. That scream is like a map:
it tells the cat where to find the throat. After that,
the scream's coming from a corpse.

You're lucky to be in love on nights like this,
still warm enough to lie naked on top of the sheets,
sweating, because it's hard work, this love, no matter what anyone says.

The dead rats lie in the street, where the cat drops them.
Be glad you're not on the street now,
before the street cleaners come to sweep them away. When the sun rises,
it won't be disappointed with the world it finds,
the streets will be clean for the new day and the night that follows.

Just be glad you were in bed,
where the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses.

Glück, Louise. A Village Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. 31.

2010-01-26T13:03:00.001-06:00

Chase Twichell

2009-12-31T03:06:00.001-06:00

Animal Graves

The mower flipped it belly up,

a baby garter less than a foot long,

dull green with a single sharp

stripe of pale manila down its back,

same color as the underside

which was cut in two places,

a loop of intestine poking out.

It wouldn't live,

so I ran the blades over it again,

and cut it again but didn’t kill it,

and again and then again,

a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke

on me like a swarm of bees.

It took so long

my mind had time to spiral

back to the graveyard

I tended as a child

for the dead ones, wild and tame:

fish from the bubbling green aquarium,

squirrels from the road,

the bluejay stalked to a raucous death

by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter,

who himself was laid to rest

one August afternoon

under a rock painted gray, his color,

with a white splash for his white splash.

Once in the woods I found the skeleton

of a deer laid out like a diagram,

long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools

with the string rotted away,

and the dull metal shaft of the arrow

lying where it must have pierced

not the heart, not the head,

but the underbelly, the soft part

where the sex once was.

I carried home the skull

with its nubs of not-yet-horns

which the mice had overlooked,

and set it on a rock

in my kingdom of the dead.

Before I chopped the little snake

to bits of raw mosaic,

it drew itself

into an upward-straining coil,

head weaving, mouth open,

hissing at the noise that hurt it.

The stripe was made

of tiny paper diamonds,

sharp-edged but insubstantial,

like an x-ray of the spine

or the ghost beginning to pull away.

What taught the snake to make itself

seem bigger than it was,

to spend those last few seconds

dancing in the roar

and shadow of its death?

Now I see, though none exists,

its grave:

harebells withered in a jar,

a yellow spiral

painted on a green-black stone,

a ring of upright pine cones for a fence.

That’s how the deer skull lay in state

until one of the neighborhood dogs

came to claim it,

and carried it off to bury

in the larger graveyard of the world.

Twichell, Chase. "Animal Graves." poets.org.

2009-12-30T15:03:00.002-06:00

I ordered a book today: The Poets Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser.

I want to take it birdwatching. I want to carry it in my knapsack, a camera with a long lens, a thermos of hot chai tea, my writing notebook, a good pen, my Sibley, my quiet.

Georg Trakl

2009-12-27T23:34:00.002-06:00

Downfall

Above the white pond
Wild birds have flown away.
In the evening an icy wind blows from our stars.

Above our graves
Night leans down with its shattered forehead.
Under the oaks, we rock in a silver skiff.

The town's white walls keep ringing.
Beneath the arches of thorns,
O my brother, we are the blind hands climbing toward midnight.

TR. DANIEL SIMKO

Trakl, Georg. "Downfall," Trans. Daniel Simko. Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. Ed. Carolyn Forché. New York: Norton, 1993. 80.

Robert Lowell

2009-12-26T02:02:00.002-06:00

The North Sea Undertaker's Complaint

Now south and south and south the mallard heads,
His green-blue bony hood echoes the green
Flats of the Weser, and the mussel beds
Are sluggish where the webbed feet spanked the lean
Eel grass to tinder in the take-off. South
Is what I think of. It seems yesterday
I slid my hearse across the river mouth
And pitched the first iced mouse into the hay.
Thirty below it is. I hear our dumb
Club-footed orphan ring the Angelus
And clank the bell-chain for St. Gertrudes' choir
To wail with the dead bell the martyrdom
Of one more blue-lipped priest; the phosphorous
Melted the hammer of his heart to fire.

Lowell, Robert. Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. 39.

Anne Carson

2009-12-20T23:17:00.002-06:00

Audubon

Audubon perfected a new way of drawing birds that he called his.
On the bottom of each watercolor he put "drawn from nature"
which meant he shot the birds

and took them home to stuff and paint them.
Because he hated the unvarying shapes
of traditional taxidermy

he built flexible armatures of bent wire and wood
on which he arranged bird skin and feathers--
or sometimes

whole eviscerated birds--
in animated poses.
Not only his wiring but his lighting was new.

Audubon colors dive in through your retina
like a searchlight
roving shadowlessly up and down the brain

until you turn away.
And you do turn away.
There is nothing to see.

You can look at these true shapes all day and not see the bird.
Audubon understands light as an absence of darkness,
truth as an absence of unknowing.

It is the opposite of a peaceful day in Hokusai.
Imagine if Hokusai had shot and wired 219 lions
and then forbade his brush to paint shadow.

"We are what we make ourselves," Audubon told his wife
when they were courting.
In the salons of Paris and Edinburgh

where he went to sell his new style
this Haitian-born Frenchman
lit himself

as a noble rustic American
wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist.
They loved him

for the "frenzy and ecstasy"
of true American facts, especially
in the second (more affordable) octavo edition (Birds of America, 1844).

Carson, Anne. Men in the Off Hours. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 17.

Kay Ryan

2009-12-17T01:03:00.002-06:00

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

Ryan, Kay. "Home to Roost." poets.org.

Dorianne Laux

2009-12-13T13:21:00.002-06:00

Laux, Dorianne. "Hummingbird." Red Dragonfly Press, 2004.

Dana Levin

2009-12-12T11:10:00.002-06:00

Magpie

A tendon, an eye. Hanging
         from a string of fat, steaming
in the morning light, the beak, the pincers,
         holding it tight.
Do you think it's repulsive? Do you think it is
         an amber jewel?
Black bird, white bird, unconcerned with you--
         See it hop, pick
through the frosted fur, the blood
         thawing, beginning to run--Magpie, treasure
in the mangled deer.
         Claws biting in
as it cocks its head at you,
         eye swinging from its mouth like a diamond
tear,
         cold and glittering in the icy air--asking
Do you think
         these feathers are beautiful, spread out
iridescent
         against this matted haunch? Will you be like this
with the bones of your father,
         will you radiate
a vital plumage
         and perch on him in the frozen ditch?
No pause, no grief, the heart beating
         in you--
a red scrap of flesh in your black beak.

Levin, Dana. In the Surgical Theatre. Philadelphia: The American Poetry Review, 1999. 46.

Justin Roth

2009-12-10T22:34:00.002-06:00

Roth, Justin. "Dead Horse Trampoline." Shine. Rothirric Music, 2003.

Stephen Dobyns

2009-12-10T21:56:00.000-06:00

Making An End

Furless, skin the color of fresh cream, the horses
have not yet begun to decompose. Three men
stand near them, jab them with sticks. Spiders
in white face mount the horses and three men,
laughing into paper hats. Crows eat everything
in sight. Watch your feet. I hunt children
with a bow and arrow, looking for what I've
already forgotten. Sometimes I see their faces
in the trees--drooping moustaches, tattoos, Rosa,
1941. After a rain the trees turn to neon, green
breaking from their leaves like royalty, Madagascar.
Death is a young man in a red shirt, a seller of tickets.
He smiles from his library, proud of his Dickens
and Gautier, delaying a greeting until later.
Three children follow me, dragging a cart, carrying
one of the horses; red and yellow streamers
cover the wheels, pieces of television antennas.
A fireman's band plays "Sweet Abilene." The crows
begin on the ground. I join the crowd in front of
the coroner's, also a young man. He passes comic hats
in lines stretching back to the cities, legends
of cement. Having devoured its rays, the crows
begin on the sun itself. A festival of waiting.
Colored lanterns float over our heads; painted faces
becoming the faces of the crowd. The coroner touches
a switch. Someone blinks off, then another and
another. Wild anticipation.

Dobyns, Stephen. Concurring Beasts. New York: Antheneum, 1972. 11.

Sophie Cabot Black

2009-12-09T20:25:00.002-06:00

Counting the Darker Birds

After the one crow, it is no longer
In my hands. To keep from the next bird,
Any black stain; to get away from the river,

From sifting bone, claw, a few left stars
Of blood or scat filled with bark. The smallest grief
Makes a church of each place broken,

Or unfinished, like following an old road
To see where it ends. Leaning down
From my horse I realize I have lost track;
Many are the signs to walk by. After

The first crow, it is too late: already I am
Hurrying, the little hands of cottonwood
Leaves turn in one direction, consider
Rain, darkness piling up in the trees.

Black, Sophie Cabot. The Descent. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2004. 20.

Adam Zagajewski

2009-12-03T23:09:00.015-06:00

Dead Sparrow

Among all objects
the dead sparrow in its gray topcoat of feathers
is the least unusual.
Even a roadside stone looks like
life's prince when compared
to a dead sparrow.
Flies circle it,
intent as scholars.

Zagajewski, Adam. Trans. Clare Cavanagh. Without End: New and Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 18.

Elizabeth Bishop

2009-12-03T00:40:00.005-06:00

Trouvée

Oh, why should a hen
have been run over
on West 4th Street
in the middle of summer?

She was a white hen
--red-and-white now, of course.
How did she get there?
Where was she going?

Her wing feathers spread
flat, flat in the tar,
all dirtied, and thin
as tissue paper.

A pigeon, yes,
or an English sparrow,
might meet such a fate,
but not that poor fowl.

Just now I went back
to look again.
I hadn't dreamed it:
there is a hen

turned into a quaint
old country saying
scribbled in chalk
(except for the beak).

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983. 150.