Blink Admires the Bushtit
—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville
SPRING CRAZY
The thinnest glass between cat
and bird; between bushtit and his own
reflection in the window.
Tiny bird I’ve only seen in gossipy
flocks—but spring changes
everything. All afternoon that little
nondescript bird
peck-pecks solo/lovelorn at the glass
by my computer as I
tap-tap words for spring
and Blink our cat lusts to grab him
beak and feathers—this bird
gone mad to kill the enemy/himself.
The thinnest glass holds them
invisibly apart, and safe from spring’s
raw passion to spring.
________________________
SURE SIGNS OF SPRING
Four sky-blue eggs
in a nestbox on field-fence; I note
WEBL (Western Bluebird) in the logbook.
We move on. Swallow babies
have fledged from box #5. While you
watch them soaring for bugs above the green,
I sit down in deep spring grasses.
Purple brodiaea and golden fiddle-neck
in bloom—a lovely, hazy-warm
morning. I open the binder to make my
notes. Feel something odd
between shorts-cuff and gaiters.
I’m sitting on a small
snake. You come to look.
“Let’s take it home, put it in our garden.
Gopher snakes are good.”
“What about these tiny rattles?
and the pit-viper head?”
It’s just a baby, and didn’t seem to take
offense—not like the other rattlers
I’ve met on this bluebird-trail. We leave it
to its lovely warm spring morning.
_______________________
BREAKING DAY OVER RIMROCK
That land’s stunted in its womb, pressing
out rock like shell casings, eroded
by floods down the tilted creek; thin-skin
soil for unthrifty oaks on twisted roots.
Man’s no more than the dandelion
of easy plains, a break of willow.
I seek the borderland gap for coyote
dark before dawn, and night
looses its imperfect span of silence.
Now the small hawk screams low,
chasing plumes of sky. Reality’s angel-
choir, invisible birds start singing
from the wind’s scroll. Bone, rock, sinew,
and soul hold what the flesh won’t.
_______________________
NO CURE
It started out by hammering. Hard, aching
work with a sing-song refrain.
His arms developed rhythm like an urge
to speak; each hammer-stroke a syllable
wishing to become a word. The ache
moved muscle to brain, accents colliding
with each other, German with Spanish,
Latin, Old Provençal. His head throbbed
gibberish, nursery-rhymes in tongues
he’d never heard, playing leapfrog
with English. Sleep came hard, broken by
hypnagogic startles. One morning he
woke, hair at attention, reaching for sky-
messages, words out of dream, the hammer-
stroke rhythm demanding dance and
song. No matter the words, call it a poem.
________________________
OUT OF
what they call the sterility
of winter, someone lit a thousand
white candles on the rhubarb we planted
last summer. And o the green
contours of clover covering the ground!
In this garden there is no fall
from good graces.
No more gunshy at the crack of dead
branches—now I must rifle
through a thesaurus
just for the words of this morning.
________________________
Today's LittleNip:
Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"
—Robin Williams
________________________
—Medusa, thanking Taylor Graham for today's sumptuous fare, and wishing us all the best of the Vernal Equinox!
Rhubarb at the Graham's
