NESTS AND NESTLINGS
"A difficulty that all birds have to overcome is that their future offspring must spend a period of time as an egg." (A Guide to the Nests, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds)
In chimneys and in crevices
tussocks of grass,
birds conceal their quandaries --
pyriform and subelliptic
Jackson Pollock
any pattern cryptic
Nest lined witch recipe --
feathers snakeskins, cowdung seedpod
catkins, bud scales, wool --
crochet caterpillar webs
and bind with black-thread roots
Each magicked assemblage: a trick
even when murdered sibs
don't bonefill twig interstices
Truth is the ping-pong round clutch
on ground at best scraped
or your winter boots braced
inside the curve of concrete pipe --
mind that coat --
paint-transformed by school's cheap builder
as tunnel at asphalt's edge
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
Oh, I love this. Love this.
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