Why Are You Always Writing Elegies?
At first light, you want to recall the dawn chorus of your childhood
and compare it to sound's relative scarcity, though not all
sounds are scarce around here: sirens, trains, people talking
as they rush to the station, music blasting out of souped-up cars.
Be honest, though. If any place still has much of a dawn chorus outside
an official park, it could well be here, what with organic mamas growing
sunflowers and beans in mulched backyards, and flowers in patterns
approaching a meadow for the butterflies, and other yards, where people say,
"I just don't have the time, let's see what volunteers."
The other day, on your way into the DMV, a hummingbird swooped
past you, though this doesn't say much about the dawn chorus, truth be told,
consumed by feral cats and the little bit of Roundup someone can't resist
when it's time to sell a house, and so what is your share of the blame?
Prismatic
For ten miles, rainbows
illuminate the freeway.
Liminal state between
wet and dry, between the road
and "Are we there yet?"
At the University Avenue exit,
as we round the curve, more
rainbows light the sky
past scaffolding, past Chevron,
past Canned Foods, past Indian Buffet,
framing the dry autumn hills.
Now, we are almost home.
Art information
- "Flower Wall" © Carol Dorf; used with permission.
Carol Dorf is poetry editor at Talking Writing. Her poems have appeared in Canary, About Place, Sin Fronteras, Scientific American, The Mom Egg, Spillway, Maintenant, OVS, Best of Indie Lit New England, and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley, California.
Carol read the two poems here and others at TW's "Digital Poets and Nature" panel for the AWP 2015 conference in Minneapolis.
