Feeling suitably empty
and slight as a hungry
sparrow this morning, I leaned
and slurped a spare cup of
coffee at the open kitchen window looking
hard out at the crisp April sky
With a windy
phenomenlogical
cry, I felt it
try to yolk me back
to my I
as it practically begged
some skinny poet in me to describe
with decadence its somewhat
more imaginative features
Suddenly, its tender ships of of tangled
clouds were like myriad-masters drifting slowly
through some lusty blue yonder or another;
and its flagrant flocks of brassy geese got
recast as heedless v's cutting swatches
of spacetime ripples through endless
low-hanging ponds or whatever and
frightening all the scant small fidgety
robins, who, worst of all, started darting
and hopping in swing-time in almost
no time like Charlie Parker or--
But then,
I remembered
that I thought I
saw it said in a
book or some such
that I read that I ought
to just sit for as long
as I could and concentrate,
single-mindedly, on the
pointlessness of empty
space, and the emptiness
of sky, and all that
sort of nothing stuff
for as long as I possibly
mindfully could;
so I shut
the window, closed
my eyes, and
thought I would try it,
so I breathed in,
and I sighed,
and again,
and on
it went,
and I
kept on
trying
until the
only
sound I
heard
outside
was
the only
thing
that could
possibly
share my
shiny
single-mind:
One stubborn motherfucking woodpecker.
