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Jackdaw

One Poem by Peter Streckfus

Second Level Window 

Come up, through the timbers below this window.
Pass a cedar near the oaks and poplars, leafless gray boles,
Centered among them, from my view, the evergreen.
A song, the flecks of your eyes.

A bird, the same bird, eats from the fruit. Bluish grey head and shoulder, brown below. Black striped tail.
A bird at the cap of every fruit.
Hooded crow. Jackdaw.
Bird of the woods.

A story that presupposes nothing other than itself.
What else to do then, but to talk to you about nothing.
The drone of the engines across the woods. Perhaps they are grading the paths.
And now they’ve killed the motors.

Sun on the southern side of the trees.
The naked canopy of branches, forming a kind of fourth story in the woods.

 

 

 

Peter StreckfusPeter Streckfus is the author of Errings (Fordham University Press, 2014) and The Cuckoo (Yale University Press, 2003). He is on the creative writing faculty at George Mason University and Cedar Crest College and is editorial co-director of Poetry Daily.

Header photo by snibl111, courtesy Pixabay.

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