MORNING CROWS IN A FRESH MOWN FIELD BEFORE RAIN
Three in a group then one coming from a distance
to make four dividing into two scavenging pairs.
They waddle like ducks, dibble like robins.
This close to the earth they have nothing to say.
And yet as they bobble in a hands-behind-back
colloquy of feints and nods they are the ankle boots
of an idea gone missing, their laces threaded
through eyelets but left untied, accountants
of random expenditures, connoisseurs
of the worm’s catacombs of waste, they limp eastward,
toward the mountains, covered in contractor bag
capes, one wiry boot then the other on the ground.
If they would stay just where they are all morning,
they’d be the monument to the history they’re looking for.
MICHAEL COLLIER’s The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming, August, 2021, University of Chicago Press. He is Director Emeritus of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and Professor of English at the University of Maryland.
Read more by Michael Collier:
Poem in B O D Y
Another poem in B O D Y
Sixteen Poems collected at Innesfree Poetry Journal
Poem in TriQuarterly
Poem at PBS.org
Another poem at PBS.org
Lots of poems at Poetry Foundation
These letters make Berryman less mysterious, more human. Less a sozzled immortal and more a person struggling like all of us.
We sit and watch the chickadees in the feeder, /
drinking hot tea, a celebration of security /
with dusk’s familiar arrival.
She knew, from her own observation of men, that to pretend to be macho was very difficult. She was so glad that she was not a man that she even called her daughter "Glad-I-am-not-a-man"
these clouds, some /
so light I can see the sky’s //
ridiculous boundary
There was a loving relaxation in their postures and she had to remind herself the widow was eighty, ten years older than she was or she’d think they were having an affair.
I like to be instrumental in the design of the binding of the book as this is where I feel I can express some creativity, to put my stamp on the book.
they don’t rise or fall. they’re framed /
on the walls. driftless syllables ornamental /
and motionless.
After I dropped her off, I lit a cigarette and blasted shit that could most generously be described as coffeehouse punk on my way out of the suburbs. I love people, but I’m also a little relieved when they go.
we are the dumpster fire we encircle to warm our greedy hands in the dark
Every fart, /
burp and feces, the body’s /
speech. What a triumph /
to royal your own musk.
