A Hunter Bird Surveys for Food


The shine does it. That gleaming streak of white on the brown, moving, soft, cylinder, morsel. That's what betrays it. Between tangles of greens and yellows, down there, lower than the roundings of tree tops, where the illuminating shine is found.

The little streak is like the long, thick streaks, which bounce their shine up from the bodies of water where the water creatures dwell. But those shines mean: coolness; those shines invite escape from the heat of the yellow sky fire. The little shine means more.

That small echo of sky fire sends its message to the skillful, hunter-eye. From the thin top of the narrow brown excavator. The message is: food; food for one's self; food for one's children.

Left, right, forward, backward-under: relentless search. The scope of the field of vision eternally scrutinized. A box, moving on a long black strip (one of those roaring, moving nests of the dangerous creatures who kill with strange appendages that crack like thunder and which they can discard. Their moving nests send poison breath like their bigger nests.

Greens clustered close to the land, where creatures of the ground live and play and search for their own spottings that mean: food.

And the streak is seen. The descent begins.

The Owl Approaches Sol and the Swan


Its soft underbelly heating
like a bed of wild breath.
In this it finds happiness.

This sky, calling its heart,
is a candle, a candle, a chain of
laughter in the throat of an owl
with nothing in common
with the glowing globe.

It feels what it is doing,
in the face of death.
Death, eating away all it would
leave on the edge of the whisper,
the blade of the smile.

Emergence from a magic exploration.
The face, a color in fireworks,
a yellow bed, floor to heavens,
singing, calling, pulling the fold,
on the edge of close.

As a fox would hang kindness
to the fireworks in his heart,
eating his sorrow, his need,
the bird is shooting ice into
the soul of the swan.

The bread of love, doing kindness;
it is to know; it is giving leave
to know.

It is life with random magic,
which comes like memories making
no excuses, baking memories like a
cake molested by the
common good that can never be.

Wishing the floor to the heavens
will be a gentle nexus,
shirted in all the glory
ever wanted, opened wide,
it is cheering the owl, sad,
purring, populating atmosphere
with ferocity in a rain with a pulse.

All joy and candor leaves this
pupil with no breath. The rain,
the fold, the randomness of it.

To molest it, to rock it,
embracing the swan, a sad spin,
shooting in the sky, warm,
ever so. To ignore the snow gale,
the soft nexus that taunts Sol.

A chain, a spin, a snow gale,
pulling the swan to its tummy.
A tongue, the tongue of an animal,
a violin, opened wide in heated pulse.

To explore the wedding of the violin
and the whisper:
wild bears and the wedding of the wolf.
Never knowing a savior. Knowing only
the infinite grasp to the rainbows.

"The Owl Approaches Sol and the Swan" orginally published in The Canvass Chronicle.