The barred owl calls, Who cooks for you?
Who cooks for you all? Along the cobbled
streets now clear of cars, the lamps come on
at dusk. Banks of clouds haunch low on the horizon,
waiting for the soup to boil. Where’s the hail
of locusts, the plague of boils, the black
deaths clustered like walnuts on the branch?
Squirrels forage in the quiet before the storm.
Bead by bead they’ll hide their store
of afflictions, enough to eat through the cold.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Storm Warning
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Squirrels, at least, we must share in common. Not sure about barred owls. (Quick-draw points for working that in, though!)
Just working in the appositive mode, Dave…
And because the lines work as separate poetic “statements” then I don’t need to go into the fine geographic points of where the barred owl is versus the cobbled streets…
True.
Now. What “water” would go best with a giant sugar cookie at midnight???
I hear Bacardi bottles some fine water.
You liked that “Who cooks for you?” call translation, eh? Barred owls around here always leave a short pause in the middle, like this:
“Who cooks — for you?”
The second time through, the “all” sounds deep and gurgly, the sound of air escaping around a knife blade embedded in a human throat.
This might be regional dialect, though!
I liked “waiting for the soup to boil”.
That’s a very poetic description of the “all” part, Larry! I don’t think ours are quite that gutteral, nor do they pause in the middle. But almost all birds have regional accents, as I’m sure you know.
Larry, not only “very poetic” but dramatic… Sounds like a new poem altogether!