Upon Seeing an Egret on a Telephone Line

Sister,
You aint no pigeon!
Why you spendin all that time
trying so hard to look like one?
Trying to look like something most girls
would be ashamed to be called?
Trying to look like something
that hides its face
under tattered, greasy wings
for every hour that its not
filling its gut
with birdseed
and guilt
and cigarette butts
and shame?
Why you spendin all that time
standing out on the street,
marking time
till you're standing out on street corners
standing on lines thinner than your
girlish legs.
Stradling lines between worlds
between whoredom and
"Oh, what a good little girl."
Why you spending all that time
trying to get some arbitrary amount
of grime under your wings?
As if they were marks of pride
sullying your feathers,
anxious for a spot
of color or
something to justify why
you cry everytime the sun
rises
or sets,
sister?

Why you sullying your feathers, sister?
Don't you know that
you were hatched into this lesser world clean
and pure as both
simile and metaphor for things
most people in this place have never seen
Like fresh fallen snow?
Like a peaceful, welcome death?
Like innocence?
Don't you know you are innocent?

Sister,
bobbing your head
back and forth for these
froggy fools
is a waste of your time.
There's no need for all that ocean floor talk.
If you want to cut them down,
your mouth was made
for more
graceful
thrusts than that.

Sister,
why you
wasting all that time trying
so hard
to stay so high?
When even in the lowliest fields
men will stretch their necks
to see you wading through marsh waters,
hoping you will strut for them,
hoping you will call for them.  Hoping
you will spread yourself open,
welcome them
with your wings perpetually parted,
revealing your quickly beating heart
beneath your tender breast.  And really,
you need only step lady-like
and reveal a bit of yourself
unmarred
by the knee-high mud and shit of this world
to leave them
dumbfounded.

Sister!
I know you hear me calling you, sister!
You can ignore me all you want.
Sister!  Sister!
I will never stop calling you, Sister!
I will never stop calling you
sister!

Tinder Box

By all means;
kiss me tinderly, mother-bird.
for too long now there's been
a tree growing in me
so thirsty for last season's rain
that its leaves are all yellowed
and its boughs are growing withered.
Place your scavenged twigs
into its deepest crooks.
Weave them loosely as you like.
Line them with fruit peels
and fragrant petals.
Make a nest for yourself
just here
where the wind can push all it likes.
You'll be comfortably preening your feathers
through most every storm.

And should some day an hurricane blow,
one of those cleansing squalls
who's winds and rains
make the ground into porridge
and uproot that dry old tree;
then I'll cleave to the heart
of the fallen trunk
and from the wood there I'll make a box
where I can place what's left of
     --your gathered twigs
     --your fragrant petals
     --your cherished fruit peels.
A box where I can keep
your tinder kisses.

     Have I ever told you
     how much your touch is like
     striking flint?

See there, the Grackle

See there, the grackle
with its golden eye fixed tight
upon your delicious own?
See the scratching claws?
See the razor beak?
But most of all see the plumage.
They've made feathers out of inkwells.
Made down and flight out of blackest night.
They've taken sticky liquid fright and made it into a bird,
smooth and slick and powerful enough
to shrug off gravity itself.
See it slip between wind drafts
like a thief through louvers.
It is a thing of beauty
if you can brave staring into its golden eyes
while it stares into your delicious own.

See there the grackle.
See it rest on the perch above your head
too far to touch but too close not to be frightening.
See it puff to a size three times its own.
See it raise feathers along its everything,
along its very being.,
See its golden eye gleam brighter
and more darkly all at once,
see it seeing somewhere deeper
into its very own soul,
into that black pit that only black things see into.
See what mammals know as rage
written on both rigidly held wings.
See wrath spelled out on splayed tail feathers,
see the promise of vengeance for every hatchling
falling its nest before its time
from every public park tree you quietly watched them chop down.
See it open its jaws and reach down into itself
letting out a sound that danced on that line
halfway between funeral wail and battle cry.

Now see the grackle smooth itself.
See it make itself into an oil slick
resting carelessly on water.
See each feather go back in place
like children after curfew.
See it shrink, three times, to its own size
and see its eyes dull
to something more like a living thing
and less like something set afire.
Most importantly, see it forget,
as if it could never harm a soul.
As if the entire second stanza
has been just a cruel human work of fiction.
As if it could not possibly be capable
of feeling such rage.
See the outburst and the aftermath,
as if you were watching two different creatures.
Now see the sweet grackle turn to you.
And flex its dainty talons.

And when my son asks me
what we'll eat while in the forest
I'll show him the trees and their leaves and bark,
how to spot it at a glance and know good plants from bad.
And when my son asks me about women,
we'll talk about the birds and the bees.
This is how I see it.
He'll ask me questions too big for classrooms
and I'll point him to nature,
where all the answers present themselves to us
like open books.
And when my son asks me where his people are;
when he points to pictures older than I am and asks
where are all the dark, smiling faces
who used to drink cashew wine at parties
and make music with their own hands
and the things men throw away,
and where are all the people
who used to brukdown and bram,
the ones he's heard stories of,
the ones he reads of in his atlas.

I'll say: Look, son.  See the Grackle.
Really see it, beautiful and horrible as it is.
See its blue, brown, black plumage,
See its golden eye sizing up your delicious own.
See its rigid wings.
See its splayed tail.
See its sudden gentility.
Now see yourself.

If the grackle knew how
our mouths have been shaped as little children
and how they reached in past our gullets
so that we said the word the same way that we vomit.
Black.  We still say it like vomiting.
Like calling someone Black was the same as
leaving sick all over their shirts.

If grackles knew how much we hated their blackness,
they would lighten their feathers to grey. 
They would practice to sing the songs of other birds
in voices and accents that don't quite fit the strict patterns of Kiskadees,
but they would persist, painfully. 
Painful for everyone listening but none would be harmed more
than the grackles themselves. 
They would destroy that thing that made them grackles,
and instead they would be simple-minded mockingbirds. 

If grackles knew how frightening they were
they'd never smooth their feathers,
but wear them raggamuffin rugged
They'd fly only in threatening dives
and steal food from your mouths
and your children's mouths
the same way they do other grackles.
That's right, not even other birds would be safe.

And if grackles knew how frightening they were
perhaps they'd spend all their time
dipping into that pit in their gut
and acting only from their rage.
And perhaps then they'd be hunted, killed and caged.
Just like us.

Rainy Season -- Day 2

You can’t trust a gray morning.
You can’t put your trust in anything
As big as the morning,
As big as the sun moving
From one sky to the other,
As big as the song of everything-that-is
Rising into a higher key,
If it stumbles and falters
And can’t make up its mind.

When I open my eyes I want to know
That I wasn’t the first to do so today.
I want to see that the angels
Have already been hard at it,
Painting the bougainvillea and hibiscus.
I want to forget that
Bird nest nuh got no roof
And think them hollery one in the ficus
Mussy had brukdown all night
And still cyan’t done.

My morning muss mek I want
Missing things.
No, no shower today.
Too cold.  Too grey.
And the sound of falling water?
Much too common today.
No cleaning today.  Might need that dirt
To reach the street side
The way this water rising.
No talking today.  No singing.
Too much of that babbling
In the drain outside.
And too much rhythm on the rooftop,
Accompaniment for too much frog song.
Too much laughing.  Too much drinking.
Too much sighing, gulping, thirsty earth.