5 grackles who keep Looking Up 

in the Teacher Parking Lot 

of Organ Mountain High School at 7:29 AM 

on a Tuesday in late January

What are they looking up for? 

are the looking up

for a George Clinton mothership 

to lift them to some

funkified paradise? 

are they looking up 

for hawks who could swallow 

their heads in one gulp? 

Maybe they’re looking up for a new lover, 

or do they see their old one, 

cutting across the thick

New Mexico impasto blue 

like a portly putty knife of bird mites

and ill-conceived endorphins?

Are they looking up the same way 

we look down at the ground? 

I look down at the ground whenever I 

pass a woman on the walking trail 

to make her feel at ease. I do wonder though 

if her most stylish workout clothes, 

her sweat-proof foundation 

and her real mink lashes 

crave eye contact, long to be 

touched by some

gesture of social generosity.

Maybe she’s got something to elucidate

here, upon this bank and shoal of time, 

before our society completely disintegrates. 

Maybe the Second Law of Thermodynamics is true,

that one about 

disorder 

increasing with time,

maybe their sweet little sequin eyes 

are already crossing or busy going blind.

Maybe they’re staring at the sun 

pretending to be the bright 

perky yellow flowers of mustard weed.

Maybe they’re wondering why so many 

boat tales but no boat-tailed 

grackles in the bible. 

Maybe they’re composing a poem on the go

hoping to calve off the perfect word 

from a lexicon purely bird. 

Let these grackles be “in addition” to the news, instead of “instead of” the news; however, I’m questioning including the news in my poems: does anyone’s travesty cavity really need additional filling? Furthermore, when do poems containing the news (especially the bloodshed) become a funeral parlor trick? to poeticize tragedy, especially tragedy happening across the pond, for me, seems cheap, too easy, and continuously fails to garner any change.  Just because I put some stranger’s untimely and tragic death in a poem, doesn’t make the poison of that death a medicine — I guess I don’t trust in my abilities as a poet to do that. 

A poem is not volunteering on the front lines, not an ambassador fighting for peace. I’ve been wondering how many of my lines are simply a signal of my virtue, a beautifully rendered signal I’m on the “right side”, that I’m one of the “good guys”. This poem I am sharing now, born of five grackles, did have F-16s on their way to Ukraine, it did have lines about the wars in Africa, about the skin dead Middle Eastern children bubbling away to the marrow… I’m tired of picking the “good guys” and the “bad guys” just like I did in Montessori kindergarten when we played cops and robbers, or worse, cowboys and indians. There might be “good guys” and “bad guys” when you look at the top of the pyramid but down at the base, where the corner stones meet the dirt on the front lines, there are no “good guys” and “bad guys” there’s just humans, humans with families and brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents and minds filled with their thoughts firing around. 

I used to find poems about birds annoying and cliche but now I say to myself: don’t shoo the crackles out your poems. It’s the poet’s job to notice the world, the parts of the world that the world has forgotten. Nobody can forget the horror happening on our planet right now because it’s everywhere you look. See the polar bear with oil on her lips and plastic in her stomach? Have you forgotten about the polar bear? I don’t think so. Yet people forget the birds every day. This one teacher at my work thought the crackles were crows, let’s just start there. I’m going to start there.