The people I want most to like all do it.
I listen to their talk of swifts and tits,
warblers and sparrows, cranes and jays and gannets
cuckoos, grebes, and larks, waxwings, kinglets;
their tales of crouching, waiting, all their dense
conversations mostly made of silence.
The stories they like best, the ones they tell
and retell, are of failure: the common yellow-
throat whose scratchy song scared off the rare
woodcock, the white-tailed kite always elsewhere.
Truth is, I find it dull, and I despise
myself for that. How is it they can prize
so highly what’s not there, shape their lives
to welcome something that never arrives?
What grace is theirs, to know what silence means,
and see because of things they have not seen?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Lethe
He thought he saw her in the orchid houseand all the flowers seemed to disappear,but someone with…
On Suddenly Having Several Children
God never gives us more than we can take,”the midwife told us, after catching two—two—heartbeats in your…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
