Marianne Boruch
first thing—
Someone is poisoning magpies. Keep the bodies
out of the freezer. We’ll study their livers.

People suck! she said, hanging up. But the Indigenous Elder
could have told me that.

On the wall, a poster. Bogong moths roosting in vacant caves,
loving the cool air. Migrations go haywire in drought.

Another call: someone’s hit a roo.
The joey’s sweet but going crazy on the sunporch.
This afternoon, okay. We’ll come by.

She still could be shaking her head. Bloody drivers.
It’s the glare, she thinks aloud. They could not see to see.

Dickinson wrote nearly exactly that to
nail down a last moment, just after And then
the windows failed          I can’t tell cause from effect,
one overlay from another.

As for the magpies, their livers surely tried to clear, to strain
the poison. Fast or slow, the birds, I bet—
how many?—flew just fine for a while in screechy loops.
Then to fall, to try up again. And failing.

Shiny black/white feathers run aground near the roses...

Most raucous caroling in the garden, silent for once.

Is that what alerted the caller? Behind the house,
a sudden. It was vast.
from the book BESTIARY DARK / Copper Canyon Press  
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In Memoriam: Bernadette Mayer

"Poet, artist, publisher, and scholar Bernadette Mayer died November 22 at the age of seventy-seven at her home in East Nassau, New York. A giant of American poetry who blurred the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary in expansive streams of consciousness, she was most frequently associated with the New York School and with the Language poets."

via Artforum
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Nicole Tong on Reaching Incarcerated Scholars

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