Yellowthroat (I)
No one knows
What’s happening.
The birds
In spring evenings
Sound
Like lasers sound
In movies.
It’s a fact:
No one knows,
Least of all
The common
Yellowthroat calling
Your money,
Your money,
Your money,
From the half-inked,
Half-coloured,
Sketch of hawthorn
Hung haphazardly
In your window
Gallery. Art can survive
A market economy,
Supposedly,
But it can’t survive
Outside
Your body. A cow-
Bird will lay
More than forty eggs
In the nest
Of another species.
Such scale, opportunity.
What does this
Have to do with me?
Yellowthroat (II)
The answer is
Nothing. The forsythia
Waves
Its yellow flag
At the beady black eye
Of the warbler,
And the warbler’s
Tiny phasers fire
Sweet, sweet,
Sweet, through
The willows
And thickets. My mind
Is only here
To hear
These things
And witness
My hearing. Everything
Has a song. My song goes—
Who am I?
Where are we?
What’s happening?
That wee yellow-
Throat skulking
In bluestem
And feather grass
Makes nothing
Happen, said the sky
In its measured
Prosody of horizons.
Like memory.
Like grief. I pay out
My breath.
It rushes back.
Matt Rader is the author of several collections of poems, most recently, Desecrations, and the forthcoming critical poetry memoir, Visual Inspection. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
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