I’ve read some of your poems.
You seem to notice birds a lot.
They show up in a lot of your poems
but you don’t say what kind of birds they are.
Are they warblers? Owls?
Robins, or big brooding hawks?
Whooping cranes? You don’t tell us.
And when the birds sit in a tree or shrub
you don’t tell us what kind of tree or shrub. It’s OK.
Not everyone is curious about that kind of thing,
and even if you told us it was a nightingale
and that it was on a Liquidambar branch
most of us wouldn’t know what either of those was.
Besides, it’s a kind of minimalism
you seem to be working toward,
poetry stripped down, everything extra left off.
Really, in that kind of poetry, there’s no need
for detailed context or adverbs, for complex metaphors,
for meaning, for blood.
A coho salmon — sorry, a fish — in a store
looks just as good on its bed of ice
as it would in a native stream somewhere, blood flowing
and besides, gutted, it’s easier to eat.
You’re right. It’s far safer to peer at meaning
like you would a bather in a lake, through the trees
without letting her know you’re there.
You won’t get to meet her that way,
you certainly won’t get lucky
but at least you won’t get entangled
in some kind of non-specific seaweed
if it turns out she invites you to swim with her.
This one guy had your job a few years back
and he wrote something about birds too,
except that they were hypothetical
and only used to make a simile
about poems not having any words in them
which, face it, just doesn’t make sense.
Really, what are your alternatives?
What men care about the names of birds?
Just the limp-wristed, the sandal wearers,
and every once in a while a son-of-a-bitch like Jeffers.
Who wants to be like him?
If he had had the chance to represent his country,
to be its public poet in an age
when forests burn with all their various trees
and millions of vague animals make way
before the chainsaw and the plow and floods,
to represent his country,
one nation under the heel of god
bringing the quaking people of the world
the freedom to come prune generic shrubs
so that birds might sit in them
for your desultory, peripheral notice
he wouldn’t have had the sense to take the job, I bet
but would have said something odd
about complicity, the banal,
and the striped tail feathers of sharp-shinned hawks
whatever those are.
