“Kingfisher” and “Sacrifice” (Poems)

Kingfisher

Struggle over winter trails soft with wet
black ooze and mud like sun melted plastic,
rain-risen then frozen out of shape.
Up the bluff, a warped record distortion of sound
train and traffic               laughter
of woodpeckers and, crueler, of jays. All
sirens call me back downriver to pick
along a beach part sand, part
stone, wholly man made, shaped to my dog’s
delight, to her body’s quiver of electric
joy as she races over flotsam—metal and
glass, scraps of past parties, and loose
coals spat from the Union Pacific.
                                                         The idea of extinction
walks just ahead of us, ghostly
guide, its mask worn backward so we are
face to face. It rides a human
shape as it moves away, its gaze white
and blank through the eye holes. It leads me
forward into nowhere.
                                                         Unseen,
I sense the bird before he’s heard, then the staccato
arc of his calling flight, a needle
dropped in the groove of the river. It lifts
the song of every holy thing that hides in reeds.
The amphibian drone of another future
spring echoes back at me, the certainty
of sun and thaw, a certainty of his wing’s
blue flash, and a quick glimpse of his eye, alive
and black and wild with potential. Incoherent
composure of an eye that knows
this is all one kingdom in pieces, all of it
throbbing astonishment. The kingfisher rises right
off the map, severs the silver
thread of my attention and lifts himself
into the cycle, into a somewhere, a time
I cannot follow, over the edge of this world.

Sacrifice

After the flood the death of her comes
to fill these woods again. It is cold.
Sycamore branches shine like bone
talismans against a night so dark
it eats daughters. Whose story
are we in? What rides those men
who come and go with hands that break
children, those cowards steeped
in a goat-reek of sweat and cigarettes?
Men who disappear into land like the old
gods of sacrifice, leaving nothing behind
but a frenzy of flies. She was left open
to wind, cut loose from her story, run
to ruin. Now she is grief
left to fester. Our hearts cave
beneath the harrowing. We remember
how she rode a foam of frost. November
was a ground crossed by hunters
grown bored of the blind.
They tracked the doe to find her
too late, bound to the oak, frozen. Over
and over she rises wrongly dead.
Year after year her fingers throw
a curse: flood of the century
becomes flood of the decade
and worse, the old stories thaw,
shed their stench of silt and human
cruelty to turn beautiful
again in the amnesia of spring. I
want to linger here like the last
note of the last hymn sung
before leaving church, that final
echoing note that hangs in the air,
bare as a skinned animal. But when
the water slips back into shape I forget
what the trees cannot forget. Only the trees
remain with her in coldness, ghosts
endlessly listening to her last thready
breath—that horror in the hawk-bliss of winter.

Editor’s Note: The collage featured above was created and provided for us by Steven Cline, for use in our Creature Consciousness series. His phantasmagorical work can be found at stevenclineart.com.