Christina deVillier IN WHICH WE TRY TO TELL THE TRUTH You've seen the starlings coil and whip together, trued somehow, as if they share a heart or share an eye or hear the same impatient song, a song you've never learned, nor I. Sometimes you are the sunset hawk who cuts a furrow in the flock and winnows one dark bird away to bring home to the nest, but leaves the flock, the whirling mass, unchanged. Sometimes I am the humming wire that offers all its reach and roar, its line of lights and debts, as perch for sentences: the sky's bird-words, each silhouette a character. We might learn something if they'd just hold still to be deciphered but like other words they never do. You've seen the photos of the flocks. The stillness makes them seem untrue. POOR MEDIUM Orange trees march northward behind the dragonflies. Some things march northward, other things upward. Laws of heat, laws of light. Crocuses open their purple throats. Now where are the bees to mete out blessings? Still sleeping maybe in the dark combs or underground or dead. My job for the present is to destroy the aphids which are sucking the young brassicas in the room that is a whitelit nursery. Where did they come from - the aphids? Migrants, in the soil. Just trying to make a living. Welcome to the land of America in the 21st century. Here we hurry fatally by brown boys and insects and everything else offensive or inconvenient until it's all equal opportunity dust. Poetry is a poor medium for protest but it is excellent for mourning! Once there were jazzmen and golden toads. You could say it's turnover it's inevitable but usually I don't say that. But right now are killdeer and orangutans. But right now the blind jet slathers a creekside in fire where a moment ago there was a wedding in a grove of olives. But right now are gray whales and gardens. But I watch cheatgrass creeping yearly higher on the canyon slope. They shoot another kid in another city built like a prison, all vertical bars, inescapable, full of cash and cars and right now the black slick smothers another reef. Well. You have seen it all too. Poetry is a poor medium for protest. I don't want you to think I am an extremist. I think Michelangelo did some beautiful work. And Nina the shuddering sea lion prophet. There are saxophones but also tiny pieces of plastic everywhere. In your exfoliating moisturizer. On top of every coffee cup. What on earth. Like sowing the ground with salt. But where are the enemies? What is this war? When I poorly imitate a bird I wonder if it thinks that I am poisoned. Christina deVillier is a poet and farmer native to rural Oregon. She's currently pursuing her MFA at the Writers' Workshop.
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