Bird Song According to
Stone Swimmer
When it’s all I can hear
I’m reminded of how eels love,
without the world knowing.
I choose the way of the birds
letting everything see the joy of waking,
of feeding one another, of the sun.
In moments when the woods are quiet,
I think about succession and how lightning
bugs only exist when they blink in the dark;
I grow into a field of ferns
waiting for a breeze to rustle
my softness and reveal hidden nettles;
I think about elk once gathering and dipping
across these mountains and how their bugles
must have sounded against hard chestnut,
how so much fed on that fruit hidden in spiny
burs until first frost, how so much shade was given
to sweltering life, how listening is an act of love.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of three poetry collections, Ghost Hunting Glaciers (winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize), River, Amen (winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry), and Robbing the Pillars, and his writing has appeared in Orion, Water~Stone Review, and North American Review and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Spiritual Literature, and the Pushcart Prize. He was the artist in residence for the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and he believes every watershed should have a poet laureate.
Header photo by IZZ HAZEL, courtesy Shutterstock.
