​Author’s Note:   I retired in 2016 after 30 years in Wisconsin, where I taught at Ripon College, and my wife and I then moved back to our native upstate NY. I've published a number of books of poetry and my work is also easy to find online, in this journal as well as many others. A gallery of my photography is is also available  here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz

​About my poem:  The ivory-billed woodpecker (also known at The Lord God Bird) was believed to be extinct for decades. Then, in 2005, one was spotted alive and well in Arkansas. This news story pleased me greatly, and I got to wondering what other mysteries might still be out there in the swamps, undiscovered.

My Poetic License column this month is a bounteous feast of bite-sized poems.

​
As the Sun Says


I love to think that out in the simmering marshes,
some bird extinct for a hundred or three hundred years
lifts off its nest as usual, flies around as it did
during the Roman Empire, all through the Black Death

and the Crusades, hunting up grubs to gobble down
as it loves to during the Gilded Age and the surrender
of Sitting Bull, perching, preening, completely oblivious
as always to conquistador, president, CEO, professor,

utterly unaware of its own obituaries in the textbooks,
unconcerned with the very existence of textbooks,
just rising and spreading wing as the sun says
and has always said--for what else do you do?

It isn't even a question, for there are no questions,
and time is not a concept that has a sliver
of the meaning of one rotting stump, rich as always
with ants, beetles, and three kinds of savory worm.