On Hearing about the Possible Restoration of the Po'O-uli Bird in the Maui Rainforest, and: The Sorrow String
Rent from DeepDyve- On Hearing about the Possible Restoration of the Po'O-uli Bird in the Maui Rainforest, and: The Sorrow String
On Hearing about the Possible Restoration of the Po'O-uli Bird in the Maui Rainforest
An oncologist said to me once, Everythingcomes to an end. The anguish of these patientscomes to an end. Starlight comes to an end,
morning coffee, the dog at your feet. A jet throbslike an ember through a shaft of late sunlight.Even the electric glare on a prisoner's bunk goes out.
The grayish brown Po'O-uli, five inches long,has white cheeks and breast,and a black masklike a chickadee. A reticent bird,
it lives in the underbrush and does not call.The only three in the world live on one island,each in its separate country.
How to find them, much lesscreate a pair bond from shycreatures who have long lived alone.
The tribe might still be saved.Against such odds, to sayWhat's lost is lost. What's possible is infinite. [End Page 103]
The Sorrow String
Is that it, after all, crossing the sky from one season to another?
I used to know what it meant-the swallow flying all the wayfrom the Transvaal to one sill of one house on one continent,
the continent like a brain in whose foldswhose hills and valleys something monumental was conceived: a railroad, a concerto.
By what map does it fly?
From that severe height, the railroad tracks resemble a musical staffa grid for the notes of my favorite Prokofiev piano concerto,its comic and sorrowful trains rolling toward resolution.
Agitation of strings under felt hammers.
Racked with storms, the brain is a meadow thick with fireflies, a field of lightning.
Thunder in the heart-We regret to inform you . . .
I sit on the fire escape in the early morningslistening to birds gone mad with singing.Lilacs spring from buckets all over the city.
Last week, swallows were nesting outside the hardware store up the street-mother, father, five chicks-five heads gaping from their dirt papoose.
Someone knocked them down with a broom handle,and the birds looped back all day- a prairie strewn with downed lines flashing- [End Page 104] dipping under the overhang precisely to the spot where the nest had been.
Next year, they'll come back from the southto the lakes and sloughs where they circle all day long.
A wheel bearing nothing forward. [End Page 105]
Anne Pitkin's work has appeared or is forthcoming most recently in Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the New Orleans Review. Her third collection Accidental Music, which includes these poems, is seeking a publisher. She is an editor of Fine Madness, a poetry magazine.
