VINYL POETRY

Volume 11, October 2014

BIRDIE
Claire CroninView Contributor’s Note

Gathering the Darlings

I

They must have hunted us
in sleep —

great silent owls
trading places in the oaks
above our homes

Tracked us through wind
sweetgum sweat
trace phosphorous
bone-glow

As children, they renamed us
with shepherding words:

watch-box
sheared-one
crookit-horn
greener-than


and we
to their gloved hands came
downy things and careful


II

With the moon drawn slow
they led us

through halloween mazes
of their stately homes

Basements laced
with heating ducts
blind pipes

perimeters flowering
with ruderals

No one living there
exactly

No face to run our hands across

but a woman or a horse
heard kicking in the walls

There must have been a passage there


III

It must have been quite early
we learned dreaming on our backs

They wrote us into ledgers
with the weather —
great lakes pulling sheets over the town

Said
whosoever lives on land
will die on land


as all things born
beneath the ground
will stay there


Those words we learned
from birds of prey:

gauntlet
haggard
hood block
lure


and raptor from rapere
which is to seize
or take by force

They wrote us into ledgers
with the costs we incurred

one body worth
a thin blue yard of lace

In dark, we gathered every
claw-shaped leaf that fell

The moon rose high
above us anyway

equal in size
to the eye of a cask


IV

They must have hunted us
in sleep

swept us into oak trees
where the branches caught
our overcoats

Renamed us after ruins:

Amathus
Elea
Aptera
Cyrene


ancient cities
made beautiful by words

And we hung
shivering and silver

happy as bells
in the trees

the way that children
in the sky
will remain fixed there

as if fastened to the heavens
with nails

We must have learned quite early
about dreaming on our backs

Learned that a man will gnaw
into a heart
the way a beast might