by Acie Clark
For Garth
Someone at the Baptist college tugs lightly on today’s first bell. Between here
& the bell there’s a yard full of birds halfway to wherever they’re heading.
Every bird says I am a bird in their own special way & performs
the necessary violences: killing & eating & dying & being eaten.
A ring of feathers. Half a mouse. Halved, who knows why. The day halved
by light shifting its mercies. Light’s mercy lights up my life, lets me look around.
Looking around my life, there’s still so much I’m looking forward to:
S will visit soon & the redbuds will bloom & winter will be over.
These are the facts I look at when my life asks for that one tender violence
to be done. No more trying to find meaning in birds & mice & lines of poems.
The redbud bloomed pink for a few mornings & then it was over & I felt everything
I did & didn’t want to. I drape myself against myself, carry us through the day.
I set myself down here to ask you, to look to & at you, reading in your room.
What does this do? When you turn the page, what happens to this poem,
to who I was when I was who I was when I was who I was when I wrote it?