​PROCESSES 


Ten years ago I was writing poems
Brief as bird tracks.

A wing
Encapsuled an entire spring.

Three morning grace notes
Scored all summer.

A single beak
Bit off autumn like a worm.

A few hieroglyphs
On the snow
Said everything there was
To know of winter.

I was younger then.
I was more certain.

All my short spare poems
Knotted themselves into a final word
Like a crow shot from a tree.

But I’ve lost that brevity,
That arrogance
Of what is what,
And my poems
Flock like blackbirds
Gleaning word after word,
Line after line
From the waving field.
 
​They are still famished,
Cawing terribly in my mind.
I don’t know what to give them.
I keep on writing
And writing.

-first appeared in Chowder Review