Issue 4:1 I Poetry I Tim Poland

Four Poems by Tim Poland

Birds, Always It’s Birds

blue heron    stern
poised above the pool on one leg
in the drifting morning    mist

black cormorant    river bandit
dives beneath the riffled surface
rising with another captured    salmon

soaring osprey    fish-eyed
plunges and strikes its target
shattering the river of    glass

black vultures    spiraling
giddy levity of ungainly weight
gliding toward the night's    roost

migrating blackbirds    weary
rest for the night in the pines
leave behind a carpet of    crap

red-tailed hawk    merciless
explodes from the hemlocks
locked on the flight of the doomed    jay

pileated woodpecker    elusive
clings for a moment to a poplar snag
always about to be    elsewhere

wild geese    chevron
pierce the upward gaze that searches
for what's thought to be missing but    isn't

Pruning the Rhododendron

There are photographs, proof this ailing,
neglected rhododendron once swelled
each May with profligate purple blooms.

Gutted now, riven and bored out,
given over to the offspring of beetles-
the beloved creatures, inheritors of the earth.

One option remains, to cull the perforated limbs
from the remnants of living fiber and pray.
My knee strains against its ligaments as I kneel to

grip the chainsaw, set the choke, pull the ripcord,
yank the saw to snarling life, and rise to the task
from knees otherwise not accustomed to kneeling.

god-no

“oh, god-no,” she said,  “you can’t use a word

like melancholy these days, don’t be ridiculous”

a word quaint and wrinkled, retired to a

pensioners’ hospital tucked down an alley of

mud-caked cobblestones, trotted out

only for the occasional classroom visit

but I want the word back, want to spring

it from its forced dotage, let it roam at-large

to dust it off, smooth out the faded creases,

let its bile blacken and bubble again

a bathrobe of a word, loose enough for this

jumble of joy and sorrow, stasis and ecstasy

a word for the press of my forehead to the window

when a pane of glass is more than ample restraint

a word for the arterial throb in my hands and 

throat when she scoffs, turns, leaves the room

a word broad enough to stretch into a shade arbor

and curl up under to wait out the stultifying heat

“no, you can’t use it, you just can’t,” she said, 

that ridiculous word I could put to such good use

Haven

…it locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes.

--Louise Glück, “March”

turn the key made of water

in the lock made of moss

that’s me you hear chuckling

my escape already transacted   

not from but to here

haven not prison

weight me down with limestone in the

deeper pools of the up-slope headwaters

that’s me grinning like a brook trout

safe and hungry, feeding in the back eddy

shut me in behind a door of karst

wall me in with hemlock and poplar

that’s me smirking among the trees

a sly shadow in the dimming light

that drips down to the stream in the

ravine from the hills rising at my back

come and get me

I dare you