
“Gwynnie” — 11/19
“Will you stay?”
Her wheaten
buff-gold
lemon-drop gaze
compells
without judgment.
“So that I
might
s
t
a
y
?”
— C.Birde, 11/19
“Gwynnie” — 11/19
“Will you stay?”
Her wheaten
buff-gold
lemon-drop gaze
compells
without judgment.
“So that I
might
s
t
a
y
?”
— C.Birde, 11/19
“Eastern Chipmunk” — C.Birde, 8/19
Castanet
R a T t L e..
Dash
& dart…
Chipmunk
departs,
cheeks full
of
peanuts.
— C.Birde, 8/19
“Squirrel” — C.Birde, 7/19
A triangulation
of squirrels
moon-white bellies
pressed
to cooling grass,
deliberates.
Slide-rule minds
consider
pergola
baffle
wind’s speed & direction.
Firctionless limbs
(five per each)
unaffected by
gravity
space
time.
A persistence
of squirrels
calculating
climbing
flying
empties the feeder
in ten minutes
flat.
— C.Birde, 7/19
“Chipmunk” — C.Birde, 6/19
Follow me
through the garden
and
I’ll feed you
all the peanuts
my pockets
can hold.
— C.Birde, 6/19
“Chipmunk” — C.Birde, 6/19
“Wisdom & Whiskers” — C.Birde, 1/19
“When the student
is ready,
the teacher will
appear”…
I am not yet seated
to accept
this instant,
this moment,
this now —
and the sage
arrives.
Paws correct
posture;
rough tongue
adjusts hands’
placement;
trace of whiskers
prickles,
challenges
focus.
Lap
full.
Heart
open.
Progress gauged
by tail’s tip;
critique delivered
in rumble and
purr.
— C.Birde, 1/19
“Orlando, Garden Snail” — C.Birde, 11/18
Snail’s pace —
wonderfully
well suited
to
snail space.
≈
— C.Birde, 11/18
“Spiral” — C.Birde, 11/18
“Little Green Snakes” — 10/18
Stop.
Just stop.
Don’t hand her another.
She’s too young, does not understand the harm she inflicts.
Each one – gripped in her dimpled, pudgy hands – wriggles, thrashes, droops,
is reduced to a limp length of still-brilliant spring green.
Laughing, she tosses them aside – lifeless; they land
belly up, curled on the flags beneath her high chair –
the first, the second, and the third.
Please – don’t hand her another.
She doesn’t understand.
Just stop.
Stop.
— C.Birde, 10/18
“Dinosaur” –C.Birde, 10/18
Small dark apartment. Smaller cramped kitchen. So many stories up. The others mill about with mugs in hand, gather around the tubular-legged formica table. Dressed in pale, loose-fitting clothes, they shuffle like sleepwalkers.
The kitchen’s single window – large, wide, with neither curtains nor panes – stares unblinking, westward, out over a great ravine, toward a ragged bluff on the opposite side. A long, low structure defines the bluff’s subtle shifts in elevation. The structure’s white walls are incomplete in places; it lacks a roof. Slowly, the sun sets, illuminates walls and rooflines in relief. The underbellies of great, dark clouds strung overhead catch fire.
Beyond the building – there, in the fathomable distance – stomps a tyrannosaurus rex. Enormous in size and ferocity and appetite, it tears through the low, roofless building, pulls off great chunks of cinder block, plucks out terrified people…gnashes bodies with its foot-long serrated teeth.
Don’t look…don’t notice…don’t acknowledge the awful danger. Don’t allow the thoughts to twist and form and grow… Don’t look here…Don’t notice us…Don’t hurt us…
Too late.
The fear, like a siren song, trembles upon the still air. The creature turns, glares across the ravine’s expanse, leaps it in a single pump of its powerful hind legs. With a thunderous t h u m p, it lands atop the building several stories up.
Tearing teeth. Sundering claws. The creature pulls apart the upper floors. The ceiling trembles, cracks, lets loose a drift of plaster dust. Formerly a drowsy environment, the kitchen erupts in frantic cries, dropped mugs, and calamity.
The monster digs its way down and down and inevitably down.
— C.Birde, 10/18
“Frog” — C.Birde, 10/18
Caught within the tangle of scratching, leafless forsythias at the road’s edge — that pale, packed strip of gravel, bending, bow-like and away left and right. Beyond the road’s farther edge, where the intrusion of gravel gives way to tumbled brown earth; beyond the earth’s gradual slope and the slim, young trees arranged haphazardly over that gentle declination — a ribbon of glittering blue, a deep lake of still water, its surface stirred by breeze. They have already crossed, slipped through the trees, their hands tracing those slender trunks as they passed, headed for the water, out of sight.
Watching, caught within the forsythias’ whip-wand embrace. Bending forward, doubled over at the waist. Shaking head and hair — gently. The toads tumble earthward, dozens of small dull brown toads shaken gratefully free of entangling hair. Watching them hop and scatter in all directions.
Laughing.
Laughing.
— C. Birde, 10/18
“Horsetail Bamboo” — C.Birde, 10/18
Sing —
singly,
in union;
Tooth-edged wings
scraping,
bending,
bowing
in praise —
each night —
of the moon’s
ever-
shifting
aspect.
— C.Birde, 10/18