A bird in each airport terminal, pale fruit split open in the grass, a man bearing his low center of gravity just outside my house talking loudly on the phone about seeds...
Someone even says "Augury" on the bus as I ride to meet you. Nobody says augury.
But I don't quit my job when the lights go out the same moment as you say "tomorrow" and I wake from dreams of fire overtaking the town, but still I light the stove for coffee.
In Greece, everyone said "augury" and everyone watched as a snake, the precise color of blood pouring out of a bag at night, swallowed nine baby sparrows and then their mother.
And what I'm saying is everybody really reacted! They set sail for Troy! And then stayed there! For ten years!
They left their wives, their favorite and least favorite children, their soft and fallow fields, their vineyards ripe with fat purple grapes, their beds and custom fire pits, all because a snake killed ten birds nine years ago.
I watch a small, brown bird trying each window at the airport. She is trapped and I am afraid will die here. But I get on my plane anyway.
The layover is in Phoenix.
As if that weren't enough, in this terminal again appears a small, brown bird charging towards the windows.
How is it that I can ignore all this and board a second plane?
In the ninth year, actually, the Achaeans forgot why they'd agreed to spend so much time away from home and asked to leave. But an auger everybody trusted was there to remind them. Is that right?
I guess it doesn't really matter.
This poem is more-so about how an identification with snake behavior/bird murder cost a lot of people their lives.
Driving me home from the gym Thom notices the moon.
"Hey," he says "that big upside-down moon is the same as the one on my arm," and holds it up to show me.
"An omen," I say with authority from the passenger seat.
He asks what type.
The music on the radio is from twelve months ago.
"It's a good omen, I think, to drive towards something you have on your body."
I shift around in the dark as Thom changes the station.
"Years ago," he says, "around the time when I began to lose it, I saw omens everywhere and followed all of them."
A train makes the customary sounds and I wonder if I have been insensitive by bringing omens up so casually.
I really love Thom and want him to know that in Ancient Greece nobody would've thought he was crazy.
Juan Felipe Herrera reflects on his new, most personal book, Every Day We Get More Illegal. "It’s first line to last line. It’s like [the paintings of Mark] Rothko: one color, and then another color comes in and then more color and the next color. One breath, the first word, and then I follow it. I do have a sense of what it is. That’s all it is, a sense. A first line, an image, a landscape."
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"I chose to translate this whole book rather than another selected edition because, although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The 'plot' follows a general trajectory—from early to late Alzheimer’s—with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness."
