DIANE McCOLLEY
 
 

Just a few questions
 

If you are a bird, is this all music to your ears?
Screen doors slamming, kids kidding,
mop's slapstick, tire crunch, all this churn of craft?

Does bright trash pull your eye as right as daffodils,
as well as wells?  Does the pickup radio that shatters
(for me) your song shatter (for you) your song?

Does lifting up the conduited bone-conducted heft of flesh
with wings arced on the solid state of air, carving its curve,
feel like embraces more, or more like praise?

How long the flight feels, branch to wire, longer than eons
of thought print if you think all miracle philosophy compact:
as wind-scrambled grass tufts think, swaying each way.

Outside under the Tsars Prokofieff
heard soundburst birds of northern spring and made
viols into them.  The more we become all things,

the more we become ourselves,
the more becoming.  How comely the world is
linking distinguished things.

Birdsong and compact speech of grass cast grace
every which way; it surges and breaks
like lit waves, over and ever.
 
 

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