Some of the new manuscript I'm working on
continues my obsession with time.
And the new manuscript seems to be
taking the shape of a journey, an attempt
to return home to find a home in time rather than in place.
So this is the first in a series of poems
starting on this journey.
It is called, "I Have Set My Heart on the Sparrow."
The title is taken from the epigraph by Marcus Aurelius.
"It is as if one set out to love one of the sparrows flying past
and behold, it has vanished."
"One world is always beginning.
The cows meet like the burdens of sleep
in a field, each one bearing a white part,
a black part of the map.
I snow right there.
They hardly notice interference, memory.
They mean to freeze with their eyes set longingly
on the farmhouse, eyes like mud trying
to say love, eyes like cows loving a house
or deciding smoke from the chimney.
Smoke begins in the belly.
Mother and father, you are there, there, this time,
without me.
I can't begin.
All night, I listened to one bird from my bed
after it had rained.
I said, imagine there is nothing to the world
but you and the bird.
This one, throaty waterfall or this small surge, this diamond,
chipper bird.
It sings, you listen.
It can't conceive of you.
You listen.
One bubble in the darkness, that's
where I fell asleep, where a language I know only
as a language went on alone.
The spilled connection.
It's the life again where God says,
I can only use three details.
I arrange and I arrange.
I want to be able to say farewell.
I was told once what birds mean.
Their calling is only I'm a lark, I'm a wren,
I'm a starling, starling, starling.
This is my territory.
I dream my first memory.
House, I tell the cows.
I will love that bird forever."
I secretly call that my revenge of the birds
poems because one of the first things that I was told when
I began writing seriously in a creative writing program,
was that I had to cut birds out of my poems.
So it took me many years to earn back my right.
And so now I'm going at it with a vengeance.
I wondered why for a while they showed up so much.
And I think that's very common for poets.
And so I read somewhere that they're really a muse figure,
and that makes a whole lot of sense.
And I think usually when they do appear in my poems,
they are the muse speaking.