I won't get to 40 poems by Lent, but Caroline's fort project is charmed. It continues to inspire me. It makes sense that you can't really take someone else's creativity train, not to the same place anyway; still, maybe these little poems will go somewhere, sometime. Following a poem by Robinson Jeffers, here's a new one:
Vulture
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven.
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing. I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, “My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work, they are not for you.” But how beautiful he looked,
gliding down,
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the
precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of
him, to share those wings and those eyes—
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.
--Robinson Jeffers
Dawn and Lay Down
Dream and not dream,
the nectarines are doing something
funny, big as my
belly, as the 3D
sun in the Air
and Space Museum movie.
The morning glory’s leaves
are perfect hearts. Vines
thick as grown-up thumbs.
Their skin is splitting.
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