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
Poetry by A. N. DeJesús, Radka Thea Otípková, Sara Moore Wagner, Patricia Zylius, Pavla Melková, Angela Topping, Jessica Q. Stark, Karel Šebek, Eric Nelson, and M. Nasorri Pavone. Fiction by Sarah Rose Haughn, Genta Nishku, Lucy Tunstall, Petra Hůlová, Paweł Sołtys, Vratislav Kadlec, and Zach Murphy. An interview with Atomic Culture. Reviews of Eileen Cleary’s 2 a.m. with Keats and other books.
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
His astonishing, indeed quite singular ability to touch the tip of his nose with his teeth was something he discovered almost inadvertently
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
What are you reading? Here at B O D Y we’ve always got a tome or two open, and we're happy to recommend these recent books.
Me, I’m the opposite, of course – my soul is in full view, as if it weren’t just my shirt that was ripped but my flesh too, and it’s right here, my clownish soul, winking at you with a tear in its eye, because like a steam engine it’s powerful and full of emotion at the same time.
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
The wildflowers wilt over their own feet as I stagger through the dusty, jaded soil. One of my legs is broken. My mouth is parched.
