(1) No Bird Known
End of day. Across the hundred yards
I still can see, there is a single bird
appearing. Overliver of the herd,
sole survivor of those louds and hards
that own the earth, now scrying heavenwards?
Or is it – wing and dusk so closer blurred
at last they have no name, there is no word
for him among the darkened men and marreds –
a dove, his white no longer to be told
from crow-clothing, here now no better
than grain-grabber, canny late baptizer
come and among our done and beaten fold
not for to help but know – greediest getter,
through seer, no mere riser?
(2) Bird Trying to Land
See how the place he tries to set his claw
and stand is never the ripe fruit-clotted
sodden under bough, but in the flaw,
barren branch and open, nothing-knotted,
twisted to the weight of nothing seen,
bent as if supporting from below
the heaviness of heaven, where the green
leaf, here for the falling, will not go.
His wings, bent as a branch but of no tree,
bearing the eyes that will be his only seed,
arch above him, brows of the widening see
that calls him back in its ever greatening need.
O, but the branch of after! How it stays
quivering, waiting, waking both the ways!
--Lloyd Haft (from Where Is the Body That Will Hold?, 1998)
