Poetry from NER 42.1 (2021)
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the bowerbird’s meticulous in love—another sex-u-al in-ter-lude, my old teacher intoned years ago in a class on Tennessee Williams, and we loved that, we’d go crazy. So the bowerbird keeps thieving, rearranging for his starry moment in that picnic grove
—a shattered blue ballpoint
—crumpled napkins, all purple
—a sample-size bottle of blue something
—blue feathers (maybe a fairy-wren or a kingfisher off course)
—a child’s pacifier, a blue sneaker charm from a bracelet
—torn bits of the bluest butterfly wings still shimmering as leaves above
throw light like the ventriloquist’s voice (my bet is a blue triangle,
or a Ulysses down from Queensland)
—bits of blue flowers, fake and real
—one of those miniature clothespins, or two
—a broken half crayon papered cobalt
—that strip ripped from the space between cap and bottle and of course,
cap after cap after cap
—toys, parts of toys: Legos, two blocks—one small, one big, very blue, natch
—swim goggles’ blue foam, a navy babydoll hat, a chewed-up Grover
—a snail shell, barely blue, in shards
—the thin ribbon pulled to open a cellophane-like anything, maybe still
on cigarette packs (Ha! Like you know. You haven’t smoked for fifty
years! said the Archangel.)
—that wee journal you miss, its blurred blue blanking out whatever you
wrote, so much rain then into now, your no inkling in this life that
under trees in low scrub your treasure in that homage and lure fronting his love shack’s two clumps of tall grass making a narrow space for two birds and the deed, a wish and a lust, a little civilized privacy please, a charming mad answer even with fires about to nightmare.
But why why a glorious blue in the first place, this come-hither to keep a world going I guess I am best not knowing.