It's come to my attention that I haven't actually written a blog post in a long time. So I've compiled a list of excuses. Take your pick.

My excuse is...my life is boring, or at least it seems that way, because I do the same thing every day
My excuse is...I have a crane brain now.
My excuse is...I use the internet while sitting in a Chevy HHR, and it's hot, and sweat gathers on my body like condensation, and I always forget what I intended to do online and do something else instead.
My excuse is...don't you like the poems?
My excuse is...my computer is running out of battery.

Anyway, the news from Necedah: 6 out of 11 chicks have fledged, I'm moving to Connecticut in October, the Whooping Crane Festival is fast approaching, the mosquitoes are still terrible, a weird alarm started going off in the house the other night at 1am, I saw a barred owl and was closer to a wild porcupine than I've ever been in my life--and did I mention that the chicks are flying?

I Go Back To The House For A Book

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

-Billy Collins

Before Dawn on Bluff Road

The crow's raw hectoring cry
scoops clean an oval divot
of sky, its fading echo
among the oaks and poplars swallowed
first by a jet banking west
then the Erie-Lackawanna
sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel
through the cliffs to the river
and around the bend's of King's Cove Bluff,
full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park.
And the wind carries along as well,
from down by the river,
when the tide's just so,
the drainage just so,
the chemical ghost of old factories,
the rotted piers and warehouses:
lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,
formaldehyde from the coffee plant,
dyes, unimaginable solvents--
a soup of polymers, oxides,
tailings fifty years old
seeping through the mud, the aroma
almost comforting by now, like food,
wafting into my childhood room
with its fevers and dreams.
My old parents asleep,
only a few yards across the hall,
door open--lest I cry?
-------------------------I remember
almost nothing of my life.

-August Kleinzahler, 1998

Now's the time for the poems I planned to post last week. And it's another long one.

When Your Life Looks Back

When your life looks back—
As it will, at itself, at you—what will it say?

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.
Flame curl, blue consuming the log it flares from.
Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.

Your life will carry you as it did always,
With ten fingers and both palms,
With horizontal ribs and upright spine,
With its filling and emptying heart,
That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.
You gave it. What else could do?

Immersed in air or water.
Immersed in hunger or anger.
Curious even when bored.
Longing even when running away.

“What will happen next?”—
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction your turned as face to face.
No back of the world existed,
No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.

This, your life said, its only problem.
Here, your life said, its only house.
Let, your life said, its only order.

And did you have a choice in this? You did—

Sleeping and waking.
The horses around you, the mountains around you,
The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.
Those of your own kind around you—

A few times, you stood on your head.
A few times, you chose not to be frightened.
A few times, you held another beyond any measure.
A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.

Mortal, your life will say,
As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.
Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

-Jane Hirshfield

Sabbath Poem VII

There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.

-Wendell Berry, 1997

I had a couple poems I was planning to post today, but sometimes plans aren't as good as you think. So I'm posting these two instead. One has been here already...and might give you an idea of what I'm thinking about. The other gives you an idea of my answer--specifically in stanza (stanza?) two. Based on these poems birds can offer some insight, so I guess it's good I'm working with them...On the other hand, one of the only lines I remember from the Odyssey is "birds can mean nothing."

On the Grey Wolf River

-----Little ouzel bird,
under
------cliffs of pillow lava,
over
-------ice-green
glacier rapids,
---------should I
------go back to the university,
-----------or what?

-Lewis Hyde, 1988


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

-Wallace Stevens