Birding Blind  

All at once birds rise
from tall weeds and blurs
of wildflower blues
into trees. Their movement

the opposite of stars
falling, the birds disappear
as if winked out. I scan

kaleidoscoping May glory green
until, dizzied, I stand
still amid still trees. In slowness
each leaf becomes an eye

translating dazzle
into chlorophyll, each root
a tongue turning stone

into bread. Surely newly-hatched
birds -- bulge-eyed and blind,
wrinkled skin almost raw --
huddle over my head

in cups woven of fluff, tufts,
twigs, and rain-whittled ribs
of grass, asway in forked

limbs precisely too thin
for squirrels to tread, awaiting
feathers and song, or to be windfall
for a fox, a gulp

for a hawk. I wander on up
the path, wondering if any god still
sees every sparrow's fall.

I'm alert for a rustle and know
close to nothing. Spring air
touches my bare skin. I belong
like the newly shelled

to this breeze, certain of
uncertainy, a speck in the rippling
braille of the morning.  

__________________________________________________________

Laura Longsong's first book of poems Imagine a Door is forthcoming from Turning Point Books. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Heartlodge, Southern Review, and other magazines. She is finishing a lyrical novel, What Will Burn; excerpts won a James Michener Fellowship and Texas-PEN award. She teaches creative writing at Lynchburg College in Virginia.
 

__________________________________________________________

next |  winter 2008 | 
books and chapbooks from authors in this issue |  kaleidowhirl