Ins and Outs
Draw a circle—whatever’s inside it is the poem.
Everything else is the world.
–Campbell McGrath
Nesting in the eaves of the 1890’s
hotel, now a retreat and mindfulness center,
a family of red finches keeps garbling
the message. Turns out, in Finch-Speak
there is no antonym, outside/inside,
and their birdbrain can’t comprehend
Venn diagrams.
In the garden out back, I wonder aloud
in English, if the koi in the pond
are mouthing the scared vowel, OM
or just vacuuming algae-coated stones?
Water-striders skate the surface
like its Christmas in Rockefeller Square
but iPhone says—I am
in the eastern Oregon high desert,
I believe her. There’s a quail on a fencepost
tossing back his curl, full-on rebel
without a cause, and a kestrel
with a mouse in its talons playing
Cirque du Soleil on a telephone wire,
plus two doves in a crab-apple tree
watching a pickup, late for church,
racing down a gravel road,
but none of us knows anything
about no message, or how to answer it.
Outside the fence—a field of green
hay, freshly mown, layered in rows,
the sky above patrolled
by balding vultures
searching for diced up voles,
the local farmhouse mouser claims
it hunts the field only because
of instinct, and takes no pleasure
in the kill. The finches,
singing a varied warble, [which] begins
with slightly lower blurry notes,
are skeptical.
The hotel itself is circled by tall
black locust trees. Branches eye-level
with second-story windows,
last year’s blood-red seed pods hang
dried and shriveled into spiral wind-toys,
rattling like teeth
in the breeze, the fallen
scattered across the lawn.
Urban-landscaper types from Portland,
call it a nuisance tree. I fear
that I understand.
Beyond this oasis, up the highway,
two ghost towns, and in between
a lone roadside rock-shop,
shelves overloaded with dragon’s eggs,
halved and polished,
it’s run by a sun-leathered trans
in a beaded headband, from Orange Country,
originally, I learn without having to ask.
The rest is grassland
and cattle—Trump country.
Towards dusk, a flock of goldfinch
undulates back and forth across the road
before they decide to land
whistling in a ditch of dry thistle.
From a cottonwood straddling
the boundary-line creek,
a Bullock’s oriole trills
sharp and clear, his territorial aria.
Sooner or later, when the snow
from the mountains is gone for good,
this jubilant creek
will turn to dust. Or so the finches
blurb and garble—too many b’s and r’s and l’s,
to really understand them.
What’s left, in any case, is the world.
I can see the sliver
of equinox moon
and the shadowy glow,
the albedo of what isn’t
there, just not both at once
like face and vase,
duck and rabbit
through the windshield,
wiper squeaking rubber
and stuttering
like a panic attack. It’s dusk,
the fading light
stretches the estuary horizon
wider than my peripheral
wisdom. A flock of Goodwill
salt and pepper shakers
lifts off singing O’ Canada,
off-key. If only
my life were that simple.
No black ice for instance.
***
After the blizzard, Spring
seemed a maybe
then I knew,
I loved someone
else. No more snow-day
rye in my coffee,
no more myth
of a fork in the road.
I can’t take myself
back—there’s nothing good
about me except everyday
above ground,
my accountant brother
tells me, is a good day,
despite what all the clichés are saying.
***
And now the vernal
chorus from the cattail marsh
starts showing up
on playlists. Record heat,
a constant yakker,
has also begun
to monopolize conversations. Soon,
no one will be able
to get a word in edgewise. Meanwhile
***
the tide has turned
down the moon and fled
offshore, a haven for shady
lemonade stands
and frou-frou cancer treatments
now that morphine has become
an internet meme. A field medic
wants to draw my blood—
not enough O-negative, she explains,
with this recent explosion of roadside
crosses. Death is always
in front of me, but hidden
away in the spam folder.
Out of My Bailiwick
I’d like to know
how it happened—exiled
from the bailiwick
of grace,
I end up proxy
for low serotonin.
***
I’d like to know
why I didn’t
join a drumming circle
and beat my heart
in the old-fashioned way.
***
I’d like to know
why I’d refuse simple
syrup with my rye
and bitters.
***
I’d like to know
how come
I’m being charged
for sixty-three years.
David Hargreaves is a poet and linguist (by profession) living in Oregon, born in Detroit. His translation of The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets, poems by Nepal Bhasa poet, Durga Lal Shrestha, was published in Kathmandu in 2014. His own poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Hiram Poetry Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and elsewhere.