Thursday (A Precious 30 minutes to Update…) Musings

These are photos from Eagle Creek Park and Anderson Orchard. We went to both places last weekend and it was great. I love fall.

This week is proving to be just as busy as last week. I’m sure there is something I’m supposed to be doing right now besides updating my blog, but I think my brain is starting to give in to all the information I’m trying to cram in to it.

Here are a few poems that are collecting dust on my desk:

Wild Peaches

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among the wild peach trees, miles from town.
You’ll never wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and scuppernog;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.

Elinor Wylie

Devotion: Hawk

I know spring by the hawk pinning down songbirds
in my neighbor’s yard,
the little Ophelias crying in their blown-away silks
that the sky
has lied, a hedge has lied.
Then the pool
of chaos — the hawk in clench and drill and
thresh.
How quickly the song goes out of them. The
aftermath, soft,
circular. A labyrinth in ruins
I let the wind blow through
for days.
And then the rain, its soaking drench. Sun.
On the back porch slab the arterial runs of worms
dried
to a beaten silver even the stars might envy.
The trails a Silk Road crawled
body and spice
to the far cities, moist domains. And so now I stand
and the moon hangs as bold
as talon.
The black teeth whisper — narrow seeds — as the column
fills. The dead are not my worry,
slave to song.
Finch: come back. Cardinal, wren.
That one bird on that one branch
like Coltrane
on a cylinder of smack.
From high in the stacks of the power plant
where it nests,
the hawk banks
the pollen-heroined air of the neighborhood, sifts for
sparrow, muscle and throat.
Dennis Hinrichsen