Your Hand, Please. Let’s Walk.
52 Poems by Charles Hibbard
Copyright 2013 Charles Hibbard
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I. Animals
Animal Care and Control
For a moment he’s a mythical beast
flying the pavement upside down,
as though heaven had hardened
to concrete. But the world has just
rolled over him, this pigeon,
panting, helpless on the street
and blinking a fearful eye.
I watch him, tense as a cat,
mesmerized by the futile
white flag of his underwings.
Finally I strike,
seize him in my claws,
pop him in my paper sack.
Now he’s still, waiting in the dark.
What else can we do?
Compassion, drawn too tight,
would unravel our world.
But maybe it won’t be noticed
if I carry him to a place
where people paid to care
can add him to a database,
and not kill him till I’m gone.
Bark
When threatened
the brown creeper spreads his wings
and flattens against a trunk
vanishes, becomes his beloved bark.
The rest of the time he forages
spiralling up a tree and snacking
then snapping down in a small puff of wings
to start over again
or slings his hammock of needles and silk
behind the rough wall of bark
and dozes through the short summer nights.
When, for its own reasons,
the wind lifts and grows
in the crowns of the pines
the creeper is home in that dark moan.
Blinking
he settles deeper in his narrow room.
Co-evolution
Of our two species,
their fates so long entwined,
only one invented dynamite.
Thus Warden Davis
and the snow below the pines
tiled with stunned crows:
flogged like black laundry
with bats and sticks
then piled on sleighs
and dragged off for burning,
or found after miles and days
nose down in drifts.
Three hundred and twenty-eight
thousand, before the Warden’s fist
dropped away from its plunger.
And still the crows
keep coming, on somber wings,
in twos and fours, a slow
cortege of bombers shadowing
the plain of spotless snow.
Fire
As though water had never boiled,
this year’s wrens
build their homes by the dogged stream
flattering its doings with sound.
Warblers loop and light like harmless coals
in the flicker of a few lucky leaves
(aren’t flames always green?)
while frantic swallows
bank and swerve on this year’s breeze
stitching that lucid cloth
as though air could never fray.
This year’s birds in fact
know nothing of last year’s.
They perch on the bones of martyred trees
and hail the blistered ground
as though heaven this year were gray.
Golden-Crowned Kinglet II
Kinglets are as close to an annual bird (in analogy with annual plants
that regenerate each year only by seeds) as any bird gets. . .
any adversity can affect them in the wild, where 87 percent of the population
is on average weeded out every year.
-Bernd Heinrich, Winter World
What a blessing on these winter nights,
to bed down whenever you please!
To brush your teeth and tour your rooms
snipping off the yellow blooms of light,
to lower the heat to 60 degrees
set your clock to flag down the dawn,
and crawl beneath the covers
and huddle up with someone warm.
In the winter woods, there can be 60 degrees
of frost. The hurrying kinglets,
slowed and driven down by twilight, bind
in fragile balls, beneath what snowy roofs
they can find, of branch or root,
and surrender to the dark, half sheltered
from the stooping freeze.
There at last they close their eyes
and in their deepest feathers
tuck their heads to dream
and shiver, and await
the nightly sentence of the weather.
Hatch
Little wet creatures
fresh from their shells;
whatever are they,
and where did they come from?
No matter.
They seem to know me,
to have some claim,
to assume a future.
Clustered at my side
they make a raft
of trembling down.
It narrows every day –
dwindling numbers
traded for secrecy
among the reeds.
And if those trends
should meet at zero?
Luckily I can’t count
beyond one; and so far
at least one of something
there still is.
War Horses
Horses and brother equines
soft-eyed stolid pullers
swayback, lashed and galled,
who are you working for now?
For you, this should have been
over long ago; but here you are
again, belly up by the road
or trudging through the stink
of diesel and cordite,
the dead weight of our
history still dragging on your
sagging collarbones.
One more time you have to
lower your heads and pull,
one more stretch of steppe
like all the others; one whip
is much like another
and you’ve done this
so many times before.
But, horses, take heart!
This is your last war.
After this there will be only
green pastures and shade
a sleepy friend or two,
a token fence
to hang your head over
and watch the cars
whipping by with those
who live and die in them.
Lost Warbler
That day every flag stood out stiff,
straining north, as the first
winter storm spun
down October’s spine,
rim fat with rain and wind.
Far at sea a lost fleck
of August, blown off
that wheel, sank on failing wings
toward the gray net of water.
In my thoughts now
I still hold him aloft,
though his story was already told
by the time our own little boat
turned toward safety, sea-rolled
and pounded, but kept afloat
by some unearned mercy.
E
ncounter
What are you doing out here
circling and rolling in the dust
of this well traveled trail
like a frantic black/brown
velvet glove paddling
with huge pale hands
against the gripless air?
Lost blind miner
how lucky for both of us
that you met me and not
one of the ruthless terriers
who patrol this path
in the nominal control
of humans.
I recall my long gone mother
her own rescued mole calmly
stretched on her palm as though he’d
rediscovered his parlor.
I’ll do my best for you
but unlike her I remain
a worn tread on the tire of being
still breaded in the dust of desire
and barely fit to lift you squirming
to the cover of the weeds
and watch you disappear.
The Religion of Sparrows
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
–Joan Didion
The sleeping sparrows smolder
like banked embers
through the long nights
and awaken depleted,
shivering.
But in the mornings
before anything else
they have to talk.
Giddy as teens
they twitter over each other
as though the dark were a vortex
they’ve narrowly escaped.
Do they talk
teleology?
death and life?
love and loss?
They talk about
the rain overnight
who fell the day before
the shadow of a hawk.
They mock the pigeons
and praise the sun.
Finally they eat.
Snapshot of an Eternal Verity
We’ve seen that cat before!
Complacent cynosure!
In the chocolate mask
the eyes are aglow,
fired by the Brownie flash.
Look how he fits the decor,
that slacker Siamese,
stretched on the 1950s
creamy wall-to-wall:
the tail, at ease,
curled at the tip,
and the extended forepaws draw
a long diagonal on the floor,
aimed at the underside
of a pallid armchair
and one middle-aged foot
in a pointed turquoise flat.
Defocus your gaze:
couldn’t that be Cleopatra’s
brown foot in the blue shoe?
Now you’re free to raise
an older world around that
overstuffed throne:
temple or palace, pillar and palm,
feluccas on a lazy river
drifting down the desert air.
And there, smirking
on the limestone floor,
the same self-satisfied cat.
Late August
Clumps of thistledown tilting
downwind on a leisure breeze
nudged free by the soft
the puffy lemon-breasted
goldfinches who bury their faces
in that plush and nuzzle
and feel, barely bother
to eat, so sure of those seeds
so drunk with sun and heat and
late summer.
If Turtles Could Fly
In the Age of Heroes
hawks flying over Delphi
dropped turtles from the heights
to smash their shells –
the humble earth-brown
reptiles briefly airborne
perhaps daring to trust
in metamorphosis
for the few delirious
moments of flight
before their illusions
splintered on sacred ground.
Used Finch
After the winter rains
what remains is a warp
of sketchy bones, all
at cross purposes,
fluff that fans and falls
with every puff of wind,
sprung springs
from silenced clockwork,
an obtuse splay of claws
with nothing left to hold.
Today a hummingbird
hangs above that mess,
green as inspiration,
looking to feather its nest;
stares, ponders, selects,
intuiting new wings
in the ragpile of old.
II. History
Uta-napishti
I’m telling you, the moon is in eclipse, and the gods have insomnia.
They’re very restless, impatient with your workouts and your healthy diet.
They’ve taken to mocking you with margarine and day-old bread.
They dress you in ironic rags from the Salvation Army.
Nowadays they won’t even waste their divine breath advising you.
Watch yourself! You work overtime every day, and what have you got?
You wear yourself out razing forests and jumping oceans
while behind you your griefs keep piling up.
You drive your short life to a premature end,
peeling rubber toward the very thing you flee.
And while you lie all night like an entitled stone,
something silent walks your street, snapping off the parking meters.
Yes, you are a human being! A man, or maybe a woman.
Do you think there’s ever been a pair of eyes that could stare down the sun?
Honestly, how long have you been renovating your kitchen?
How long have you collected invoices in drawers?
How many times have you rewritten your will?
And for how many springs now has the river swelled and spilled seaward,
dotted with drifting mayflies?
Sappho’s Moon and Ours
A poet in those days could hear tales
Pillars of Hercules Mountains of the Moon
deserts forests other seas
sails flashing early sun
doubling misty capes and gone.
No need to gray those dreams with
Shanghai Dubai New York.
A mite in a flowerpot she could stroll her garden
in the joy of lost love she could write:
When the moon grows full and drapes
her silver skirts o’er all the earth
or words to that effect.
Over all the earth: all
the empty seas
rolling empty steppes the clockless poles
one night cloud beyond the planet’s curve.
She might have dreamed
the lunar skirts draped over all that
silent gauze extending
to calm the beaded grass.
In those days you could.
Annals of Human Ingenuity: Famagusta
If you’re interested in process
you might be wondering which seam
the artisan opened first – was it
dorsal or perhaps along the side;
and did he work around the trunk,
as you might a birch, or sensuously
peel down that bloody hide,
like stripping April long johns?
Do you suppose
the captive’s skin crawled
as he saw it stuffed with straw?
Did he feel a raw gale
across his soul while they jogged
his envelope (minus ears and nose)
on the uncomprehending cow?
And what of the faceless pasha
who decreed those festivities?
Certainly we know him well –
his honest lust and simple joy
in choo
sing from the bag of tricks
on hand to school one’s foes;
and how sweet, in lieu of a transcript
of his own famous deeds, to deploy
those simple agonies
that travel down the years.
Mrs. Roentgen
She doesn’t think she wants to lay her hand
under her husband’s new rays.
It’s a young-looking hand, slim and smooth;
he wants to shoot something through it.
But she can’t doubt him. He has the eyes of a man
who is exactly what he seems to be.
You won’t feel anything, he says. I’ve already done this,
and you see I’m still here.
She lays her pale hand on the plate.
You may leave your ring on, he says
(as she has for twenty-three years).
The room is dark, but he knows his way
among all the tubes and coils.
She hears him moving, adjusting,
with confident hands.
Time passes; anxiety turns to boredom.
When will you start?
I’ve just finished. He lifts the blind
and sunlight clears the dark.
Her hand looks just the same; the diamond
sparks in the sudden light.
It is the same. But the same is something new.
A few minutes later he shows her.
On the wet plate his new vision has burned away
the soft flesh of her hand.
Inside it lives . . . a spider,
a spindly crab burrowed into black mud,
Or a silent detonation, whose streamers climb
curving from the white crater of her wrist.
On the third bone from the right, the wedding stone
glows like a tumor.
Your hand will go down in history, he tells her.
They go to dinner,
halfway through their time together.
Works in Progress
To William Carlos Williams
Nov. 1, 1933
he wrote,
as though today
I were to write
May 4, 2011,
and free meaning
immediately began
to gather
around those numbers
like dust drifting
in the lee
of a dead farmhouse
like fear itself, like
lines
of downcast men
idling in strips of winter
sunshine,
luggage piling up
on deserted platforms,