For RetroLounge:

[Dragonbreathp9d]

A poem by one of my proffessors, and one by me, I hope you find what you are looking for:


Audubon Diptych
I. Wherein the Swallows Instruct Us on Pleasure
Because they daubed with poppy sap the stricken eyes of their young
& because each thin body, it was believed, contained a bright red stone
that could honey the word-addled tongue, balm the frenzied brain,
they were restorers, the ancients taught.
And were the restored, too,
since year after year farmers observed them, just after the autumn frosts,
plummet single-file, like a bead of pearls, into lakes where they remained
submerged until spring when they’d wing back in dripping columns.
All of which is no less improbable than Audubon’s account
of the slate-green birds pouring into a sycamore trunk like bees
hurrying into their hive. The thunder of wings in this slow inhalation –
for the tree seemed to breathe in bird upon bird – was first matched
by thunder building behind the Silver Hills, & then was paired, once
he pressed his ear to the bark, with the delicate clamor & scratch
of each one inching through the hollow. Those wings,
he imagined,
by my lantern’s light, & until his light possessed them, what use
to see them merely thread the air? What use were the half-done sketches
of his flycatcher, grouse, that for-now unworkable clapper rail beak
& hearing, instead of their ravishing wing-frenzied stream, jam jars rattling
in a boil? Thus a hired woodsman pries back the bark & allows him
one night to burrow in.
Who wouldn’t want this too? To stand within
the tree’s eight-foot trunk & gaze upon them teeming in rows?
To reach into, as he did, the crushed-quill mat & pluck them from sleep
& kill – soundlessly, with a kind of care – as many as he could carry?
Closing the entrance, Audubon concludes, we marched towards Louisville,
perfectly elated.
And despite where his story is hard to believe, no one doubts
this joy. For what could have been lacking, that journey home? There was
the road’s moonlit, moss-webbed oak, seen as if for the first time
& here in his pockets filled-to-bursting, the slender, still-warm forms.
II. Resurrection & the Common Merganser
Before he could restore even one part – tail-plunge, talon-tips
sunk into catfish flesh & whatever it is that makes his warbler
weightless on the azalea stem – Audubon invariably failed. To make,
as was always his plan, the watercolors’ stippled touch return
the quick breaths
of each bird. He tried first with a pigeon slung
against a barn door, but even if he managed its burnt-orange throat,
he could only render it as it was before him: gangly in a one-legged splay.
And before he pummeled it to pieces – humbled, irate – he tried
to build a Universal Bird, a manikin of cork & narrow wooden stumps
barely reminiscent of wings, let alone a kind of flight. But life,
he believed, could be brushstroked back & he blundered towards
nimbler forms.
Aesacus, hidden within another story, can no longer watch
river-water pearl on Hesperia’s skin, & so pursues her, lust-driven,
through the fields & woods until death reaches for her ankle
in the slender form of a snake. Only then do his desires change
& when he flings himself, guilt-stricken, headlong from the cliff,
a god, as the gods will rarely do, denies him the privilege of death.
This time, Ovid tell us, the body doesn’t change in a whirlwind fit
but rather, as Aesacus plunges down towards the waves, feathers
pierce his skin. Before long he’ll become the first merganser,
the same crested fish-diving duck
Audubon clips almost daily
from the Mississippi’s iced-over banks. Of one he notes
its triangular tongue, the nine-inch bottom-feeder lodged in its gut,
that its legs were, as usual, the color of sealing wax, & then begins
to rekindle its life through the method by then he’d learned: first, impale
with wire the sun-dried wings, its mandible & mottled breast; attach it
to a plank with a backdrop grid & mold it to a lifelike pose. Odd,
how in the watercolors for The Birds of America, we’re missing
the engraver’s final work: the river is just a few light-blue strokes
& instead of an intricate tangle of grass, a merganser soars
through an empty page. Aesacus,
for a while, isn’t finished either,
though he will be soon. Even as he thrashes in his rage & grief,
not quite bird or man, he can feel it, the lure of it beginning
in his beginning-to-be-hollow bones. What else can he do
but unburden himself, give himself over to the body’s suppleness,
its impossible glistening, the grace afforded after all?


Matt Donovan


--------------------------

Mind's Tide

Delving deep like some bird,
A cormorant in search of substance,
You spelunk within, trying to obtain
Life's treasures. You look for

Awareness, yet how can a bat
Find the color blue? You,
Through sleep, take the dive
Into the tumultuous sea

From your comfortable nest
Atop the cliff of consciousness.
Thoughts like stars contained
Like tadpoles - movement free

Betwixt the multitude of strangers.
You swim from bubble to bubble,
Taking in all that you can
Till your fleeting existence

Becomes a pantheon
of obscurity. Till you
Become a certainty of
Ambiguity.

Jonathon Vann
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Fair weather sailing, and may you resurface with the answers you seek.

:hi: