Three Ostriches
1
I know that from out there
there seems a lot to envy.
Legs long as summer afternoons
and quick as convertibles.
Feathers creamy and light
as French puff pastry.
But where there's stature
there isn't always depth.
Everything I know I've learned
from keeping an eye on the world
at the end of my periscope neck.
I lay gorgeous, enormous eggs
and hatch the most beautiful babies.
2
Oh! There are birds that can fly!
Birds with songs that can sing!
Birds who, white on water, glide
while I can only walk or run
as primitive as a man.
On the day I realized,
like a felled tree I collapsed,
my poor knees buckled back,
thump, in a great roar of dust
like some defenestrated sack
for everything I know I lack.
On the next I hung my shingle,
Plumes for hats, for hire, for quills.
3
I know that from out there
with my feathers in the air
and my neck like a third leg
and my head like a spade
I might look a bit risible.
But don't buy the bad press.
It's not that I'm afraid.
I'm not hiding my head;
I'm giving it a rest,
getting it out of the heat,
letting my great bulk have a think.
I find treasures all the time.
And it's so wonderful to be invisible.
Ditchdigger
I have a friend who has a friend whose father dug ditches
which my friend had to admit he never had.
"A hole, sure, deep and wide enough to accommodate
a substantial root system, transplant
a good-sized yard-shrub maybe. But a ditch, that's
something different. A ditch takes hours,
takes a man into the ground up to his shoulders.
You don't get strong from ditchdigging,
and you don't get healthy, but like my friend
likes to say, 'One thing's certain
when you get up every morning to dig a ditch:
you know where you are. My father'd always say,
"The day I stop digging ditches'll be the day
they find me in one I was very nearly done with." ' "
The morning is the hardest. It is morning
The morning is the hardest. It is morning
when I nearly don't remember. But I remember
once you said morning should come later,
which never made much sense, until this morning.
The middle of the day, my heart, reminds me
of a road I've never been on, it is endless.
The evening is the hardest, it's the darkness.
I count and hide my eyes until it finds me.
The hours fly off one by one, they leave without me.
I can't keep them and I can't see where they take you.
The night won't end and when you don't forsake me,
stroking my cheek, saying, "You can't come with me,"
it makes no sense, but then the sky is turning
and dark descending dawn dawns and it's morning.
