The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Joanne Rocky Delaplaine A FLIGHTINESS OF GRACKLES post,
tree, goal post, fence, now back to grass. Four and twenty, times three, give or take. Plumly says This world, says Look, says Count the blackbirds. Unlike geese, grackles flock in a circularity, a pie, opened. Instead of one, they all seem to lead. Yoga master B.K.S Iyengar—Each cell in our body, an intelligence. Grackles, me, a democracy. We live by magnetism. Females, these, nutmeg brown, not iridescent blue-black. Fort Reno Park, eating lunch after teaching class. It's Thursday, mid-June, the sky, clear. Clouds, like grackles, unraveling fringe. Behind me a tennis match. Two men
speaking Russian. Thwack . . . thwack . . . another parabola, yellow-green. My father's unreturnable serve. Dad, mom, three or more kids on the tennis court.
C'mon dad, ease up. Fenced behind the birds, a stone water tower as medieval castle turret. The prince to Rapunzel, Let down your golden hair. A man practices golf. I ask him about the park. He says, Highest elevation in the city, largest of the Civil War ring forts . . . The trip uptown, Whitman and his friend . . . Doyle . . . Peter. If you were in love with a trolley conductor wouldn't you bring him here, or come for the breeze? The grackles graze by four sloping locust trees. My fickle heart wants to lift, head straight for blue, between those clouds, or, like grackles, fly up, then return to earth. Birds, clouds make the air visible. There they go again. . . a gust . . . . WHAT HAVE WE LOST? after Elizabeth Bishop The planet's getting hotter, melting faster. Al Gore implores, Beware of greenhouse gases, relinquish fossil fuels or court disaster. The dinosaurs died out, Velociraptor, then Mastodon and Woolly Mammoth. Alas, poor fossils fuel a planet's melting faster. No one thought the dodo's end of vast or weighty note. Flightless, happy, plump-ass: They didn't call its passing a disaster. Oil spills pollute our seas and rivers. Habitats are shrinking for gorillas. The planet's getting hotter, melting faster. Extinct: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Though briefly seen in Arkansas and Texas. Could fossil fuels be causing this disaster? Some say the loss of species doesn't matter. So what: no frogs, no newts, no cranes, no pandas? The planet's getting hotter, melting faster. When we're extinct, no beast will cry, Disaster. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |