Bluebird Diaries

"Shooting the Hundred-Pace Rapids
Su Shih saw, for a moment,
it all stand still
'I stare at the water:
it moves with unspeakable slowness.'"
– Snyder, from "The Canyon Wren"








Big Oak Trail–
narrow little old deer path
in among some budding locusts  dogwood abounds
buckthorn, shooting honeysuckle,
bittersweet vines make up the underbelly
               of half spruce forest
                                        a thousand little accidents

and there is the Quercus Alba
limbs so leafless as to look like clay–
as it stands there by spring a carryover
from old stone farm days
when savannah was the city but no one to write it all down
no one to take the snapshots  no one left us a proper song
       of
          lost
               openings

we walk along the picnic point trail
dog and I
and pull her back from sniffing every touched acorn
every mouse track leaf by leaf
and move closer to the narrowing of the isthmus
where lake water can be seen to either side
city off to the right
ancient glacial formations to the north–
                   used to be all one giant glacial lake

as the city hushes
a university boat comes tumbling up along the shore
picking up experimental buoys

Su Shih talks of typhoon,
"A dragon boat of a hundred tons couldn't cross this river
but a fishing boat dances there like a tossed leaf."
The shoreline in shadow
coarse metal waves dig into the tree-lined rock
but
somewhere back in among
the prairie now – burned for the season –
char-black,
still, gardeners not yet arrived to their plots,

two bluebirds
                        flit up from their built nest
up into a simple basswood,
blue flags

away April to the coming sun