Try to see things as they were and are,
to hear twittering and hush at the same instant,

          the clicking inconvenience of nevermore
          behind a eucalyptus curtain,

ensconced in menthol leaves. A remembered face
is raven’s marble eyes and lost relation,

          is my mother and great-grandmother
          down to the gleam of metal eyeglass frames

in the flash of sparrows, gleaning seed,
in and out of jasmine wrapped around a bush.

          Dark jasmine leaves mask a moribund host, bare
          as a grey trellis, the vine’s remembrance

woven into a frame of forgetfulness,
obscuring wings and wood in a verdant orb.

From the poem “Poe in Margate,” in the collection Local Visitations.
                        

The song in the tree is not the song in the sky.
Day separates tree and air, the atmosphere 

          one tense musical note, wind a stretched hawk’s wing.
          Trees whistle a melody like nothing with

beak or pinions. Gusts add their overtone
as they bend sycamore and pine in passing

          while two hawks spiral overhead, concentric
          and intimate. Wingtips brush—only brush—where

circles meet. How trees and wind cannot touch
for ground holding one, sun the other, before

          dusk, when sun leaves and earth as rival star
          releases trees to spiral, caress wind

and harmonize their circumlocutions—
the song in the tree with the song in the sky.

Taken from the poem “Dirge,” in Threnody.
                        

	for William Mohr

But I made a kind of wager with myself,
night thinning to a crowd of hungry sparrows,

          sparrows at dawn waiting for me to sing
          and scatter breakfast, hopping and pausing

in my own pause to scatter waking blackness,
let Emily Dickinson’s hope fledge—

          hope a thing with feathers or subtle glutton
          rejoicing in millet and caraway,

a pattern of the heart in scattered seeds—
and the birds electric in momentum,

          crackling tan and mahogany, consuming
          my depression, leaving only bare ground

in the stark morning light—soil, feathers and air
paying off the wager I make with myself.

Taken from the poem “Corridors of Blood,” in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.