AFTERLIVES OF A SMALL COUNTRY

this poem where words
wage siege warfare on meaning,
where nine brothers out of millions
long to go, where all that is
is luminous blindness, swimming
with silken intentions,
the completions of

love and music threaded
through lives and eras
beyond count – into
the soft unseen. Here
massless regions shift
shapes and a man kneels
to press a word, some courage, or maybe
a nickel into a small hand.

in this he sweeps all hearts forward
into nations where spirits
behave like the shared affections
of streams and the plains they map;
sprites behave like forest pools with
star and sky moving inside.
still water.
huu

where my last
quaint thought
dies out on a sitting room couch,
and I’m exiled; I would call words
sweet girls,
so many passing
summer flowers.

SUSPECTING THE NIGHT BIRDS

were planning our days, we
tracked them through binoculars,
day into night. Half out of our wits,
we tracked the nightjar, were quite taken
by her plumage, gray-brown spots and bright smears.
Her long white wings like reedy signal flags.

Then there was nighthawk, flash of a white spot
on her wing, a guiding headlight. All possible meaning.
We became frantic with all this fragile, disappearing
avian thought and ran out to capture roosting birds at night,
blinding them with battery-powered light, netting them –
they went limp in shock. Still, they kept on

from inside their flittering peace, kept
arranging our days – in secret within the clean chill
of the gorgeous dark, birther of all things.
Till we found ourselves moving quickly, ruled
by the briefest flights – like those fleeting mercurial
spirit lights, just past the outskirts of our sight;
like any small bird hopping through range grass.

We hoped to navigate our destinies, water soluble,
set in order by bird chatter, gem-clear to the local starlings.
Now, as the last of night turns to a rising in orange,
we become aspiring guests. Birds streak along our interiors,
bend the rays in our eyes, render the world at sunrise.
We praise their abbreviated leaps, momentary departures

from the mossy ground. We think of the sadhus, their
hunger-knitted brows and sandpaper feet. The old and
terrible concern for flying free of these our multiple strands of lives –
wrapped in feather or flesh. We declare that birds are gods,
held here in trembling, balsa-weight bodies. We stalk and study,

call and pray to them – that they might plan, down in dark,
chilly eyes, to save us from our own fading shapes, doomed flights,
the cracked and false charms we desired. We exclaim, stop everything,
and the very Juneberry leaves begin their frail capriccio.

Tim Bellows, with a graduate degree from the Iowa Writers´ Workshop, teaches writing at Sierra College, Northern California. He’s devoted to lakes, mountains, and inner travels. He was twice nominated for the Annual Pushcart Prize, and his book Sunlight From Another Day – Poems In & Out of the Body has recently gone live from AuthorHouse Press out of Bloomington (see Amazon.com). Tim edits a free monthly e-newsletter, Lightship News. (It welcomes subscribers through star999@sbcglobal.net.) If you’d savor some perspectives from “an unabashedly spiritual poet in an increasingly cynical world” (Todd Temkin), this is your golden spot. Finally, Tim is administrator of the blog at http://tbellows.livejournal.com/ - for word trackers and lovers of the strange and wonderful, and open country. He’s included the entire Sunlight afterword in the blogsite. (Tim wishes he could have written this: “Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable.” ~ Walt Whitman.)

Email: Tim Bellows

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