"Birds at Noon."
Before midsummer, I shake out my pockets in the sun.
The trees pay no attention.
The long grass is young green full of buttercups.
The unknown key worn smooth in my pocket,
it seldom sees the light, yet it shines.
I reproach myself in passing for indolence, lack of faith,
not knowing the key.
Leaves are shining pieces.
When I look at them I feel myself trying to remember,
but we are new.
Over the wall bird cherry trees, plum trees with green plums,
oaks, ivy thicket, smell of bird cherry--
Prunus avium.
I can blame only myself from my age,
and it is too late now to do anything about it.
I feel responsible for what I have forgotten.
Meanwhile, the sound of magpies voices of stones in a river.
I am words that I do not hear, but I grew up
believing that I might.
A photograph passes through three lives,
and the one in the middle never looks at it.
In the flowering bird cherry trees, a flock of titmice
have gathered for the first time of the year
as though it were already August.
For the first time, they make sounds
that they were born knowing.
The swallow and the goldfinch utter whole sentences
of hard joy.
How do I know?
What is the first thing that I remember?
It flew away.
Everything is flying.
The sun is flying, and the trees, the living
and the dead hand in hand.
The jay flashes through the intricate thickets
like part of a storm, but without crashing
and without turning its head.
It shrieks for the victim so that the victim hesitates.
I try to imagine the woods as they
appear between the jay's eyes.
The dark green woods unfolding through the head
of a jay at great speed to that one syllable,
and no choice, the needle jay.
The nightingale comes and sings in the shade of the bird
cherry too deep for the jay.
I see only the woods I can see.
I am a foreigner, with this key, I watch.
The jay is preceded and followed by a brief hush
such as surrounds-- a wind skimming
like a plate over the woods, a taut invisible horizon.
Approaching it, the messenger jay, change, change.
When the echo has gone, the titmice
speak again about August.
White throat, black cap, wren sing in turn in one oak tree.
As each of them sings, a whole branch lights up.
The presence of singing.
At moments, the whole tree lights up.
The nightingale makes the whole tree light up
in the middle of the day.
Green light occurring as a skylark makes morning.
When the singing stops, I go on sitting with all
that I remember from there and from many distances.
And with all that I have forgotten,
in that grassy place and late spring, after hearing something
I wanted to know.
[APPLAUSE]