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Wednesday 9 June 2010

Anxious Passer


.

File:House Sparrow-Mindaugas Urbonas-3.jpg



Anxious Passer
domesticus
with broken

wing hopping more
or less unremarked
under a parked car
out of heavy traffic
on Shattuck -- what's
done past and gone
before it's noticed




File:House Sparrow-Mindaugas Urbonas-2.jpg



Male housesparrow (Passer domesticus), Vilnius, Lithuania: photos by Mindaugas Urbonas, 2007

9 comments:

Curtis Roberts said...

I will never forget that handsome, intense-seeming, anxious bird.

Phanero Noemikon said...

there is a strange hall
full of lovely portraits
between the word

alien
and cuckold

there is a stone hand
in the hall
with hollow birdcage
fingernails

where amoebas
of pink down
hover and tweet
through delicate
hollow bones

bagpipes
with alabaster
straws

the sparrow
is lanzarote
ala
anxiomatico

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

Sweet bird! In a parallel universe, Melospiza melodia 'appears' here ---

6.9

grey whiteness of cloud against invisible
ridge, song sparrows calling from branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

part in which such “regions”
equal inertial systems

weight of body, as necessary
consequence, of measure

sunlit white clouds against top of ridge,
wingspan of osprey circling over channel

TC said...

The sparrow seemed on the one hand pretty helpless, on the other tough enough not to give up without a struggle.

Wish I knew that feeling.

Otherwise... reverie just now featuring a thirsty sparrow sipping intense inertial systems of a parallel universe out of an alabaster straw at Punta Papagayo, across the burning arid desert of the Rubicon in Lanzarote.

More on that later maybe...

Phanero Noemikon said...

maybe we could find an image of somebody playing

the pito d'agua
or

water flute?

I saw a native of Lanzarote playing one years ago in a National Geographic..

Julia said...

As you said, Tom, I have seen very tough and really confident sparrows

human being said...

heartrnding!


loved the way you used the scientific name of the bird... creating a deeper perspective... through the double meaning of the words...

TC said...

Thank you for noticing that, hb... of course the play on the taxonomic nomenclature creates the "hinge" of the poem.


Julia, your Buenos Aires sparrows are brilliant survivalists. (I hope everyone who reads this will click to see them!)


Lanny, here's a pretty cool little Nicaraguan pito de agua... meanwhile see you later in Lanzarote (in my dreams).

TC said...

Well, the journey was a bit taxing, but...