Bird web

Choosing between poetry and hunger,

the boreal chickadee, its impossibly round flank,

finds the morning thick in foliage,

hops to a new twig and affixes its feet around the branch, and

swings upside down to mouth the underside of pines and of cones.

Like god and cats, it prefers to remain hidden.

will not greet you at the door, but would rather you come to it

and sit silently until you slip away from self and 

into something else - the breathing mass of dust that

woke up today for no speakable reason. 

Walking into the turn where the amber light of late morning

chimes through boughs of larches and spruces take

back to another turn where the light just before dusk

cascaded yellow and all that there was to do was to stop 

and ask once again the color of heaven.