Right foot here,
Left foot there
Spine straight
Hips square
Ribs knit
Chest lifted
Earth rooted
Heaven crowned…
Observe Tree Pose
& clearly see
similarity
to The Hanged Man
(reversed):
Release
Detachment
Altered View
Fear of Sacrifice
Drishti set
on the horizon
Balance & surrender
Vain struggles cease
Find, in equilibrium,
freedom to embrace
this change
in perspective,
freedom to accept
what
is.
— C.Birde, 2/21
Halloween,
that narrow,
bone-thin,
spectral eve
when we neatly fold
and lay aside
our everyday disguises
and pretend to be —
’til midnight’s peak —
something other
than what
we otherwise pretend
each day
to be.
— C.Birde, 10/18
Small dark apartment. Smaller cramped kitchen. So many stories up. The others mill about with mugs in hand, gather around the tubular-legged formica table. Dressed in pale, loose-fitting clothes, they shuffle like sleepwalkers.
The kitchen’s single window – large, wide, with neither curtains nor panes – stares unblinking, westward, out over a great ravine, toward a ragged bluff on the opposite side. A long, low structure defines the bluff’s subtle shifts in elevation. The structure’s white walls are incomplete in places; it lacks a roof. Slowly, the sun sets, illuminates walls and rooflines in relief. The underbellies of great, dark clouds strung overhead catch fire.
Beyond the building – there, in the fathomable distance – stomps a tyrannosaurus rex. Enormous in size and ferocity and appetite, it tears through the low, roofless building, pulls off great chunks of cinder block, plucks out terrified people…gnashes bodies with its foot-long serrated teeth.
Don’t look…don’t notice…don’t acknowledge the awful danger. Don’t allow the thoughts to twist and form and grow… Don’t look here…Don’t notice us…Don’t hurt us…
Too late.
The fear, like a siren song, trembles upon the still air. The creature turns, glares across the ravine’s expanse, leaps it in a single pump of its powerful hind legs. With a thunderous t h u m p, it lands atop the building several stories up.
Tearing teeth. Sundering claws. The creature pulls apart the upper floors. The ceiling trembles, cracks, lets loose a drift of plaster dust. Formerly a drowsy environment, the kitchen erupts in frantic cries, dropped mugs, and calamity.
The monster digs its way down and down and inevitably down.
— C.Birde, 10/18
The three women stand – barefoot, shoulder-to-shoulder – before a mammoth, trapezoidal wall, a plaster expanse the deep, teal-blue of an undisturbed lagoon. Their hair tumbles, unrestrained, about their shoulders, cascades over the night-sky robes skimming their bodies. Arms uplifted, the sleeves of their robes slipping past their elbows, past their smooth forearms and biceps, they press, press, press their palms against the wall, against their own cast shadows. When, smiling, they tip their heads back, their laughter is fluid, effortless joy — the sound of blackbirds released into an unbound sky.
— C.Birde, 9/18
“…it’s like…”
A sourceless voice,
mild as spring,
spare as winter.
“…scattering breadcrumbs…”
They appear in hand,
tiny, pale fragments,
brittle as stars.
“…in a graveyard.”
The landscape shifts,
the monuments resolve –
tall, dome-shouldered,
indecipherable.
— C.Birde, 9/4/18
He stands just behind my right shoulder – a young man, so comfortable in his own skin, his presence adds inches to his height. And, in six-year-old guise, he clutches my left hand as tightly as his young strength allows. The nine-month-old him sprawls, arms and legs akimbo, in complete abandon on the bed’s rumpled sheets; while he-at-twelve sits on the edge of the same bed with arms defiantly crossed about his narrow torso – purposefully, he avoids my eye, assures himself that I know this. Finally, there, in a knot of sheet spilled upon the floor, is his smallest and youngest form – a red faced, yowling and inconsolable, thumb-sized infant whose continuous, shrill shriek drives all ability to think from my skull.
— C.Birde, 7/18
Patient night —
with winking, starless
eye and
half-moon smile —
She conducts
the crickets’ song,
distorted by the hum
from window fan,
by ceiling fan’s
arrhythmic tick…
And,
beneath it all,
the thought-loop whirs,
that well-oiled
Mobius strip of
shoulds &
woulds &
musts &
haven’ts.
Loop and whir.
Repeat.
Night’s darkness thins,
rinsed pale and
watered
by dawn’s soft steps.
Tomorrow —
surely —
sleep will
come.
— C.Birde, 7/18
As I descend the cellar steps
and pause but halfway down
to peek below…
a warm light flows
from windows
recessed high up
in smoothed cement walls
that peer out over
grass-green lawn.
This basement space –
large and open as it is,
its floor a level plane
of low-pile carpet –
lacks most namesake objects.
No furnace here,
nor workbench,
hot-water heater, or
storage shelves.
It is not, however,
empty.
A score of cardboard boxes
the area defines,
pushed against the walls,
and at its center cluster.
And each box —
by cat with kittens,
or a rabbit and her kits —
is occupied.
Each mother tends her litter –
grooming,
nursing,
nurturing –
in unworried fashion.
Paused upon the stairs,
I hear the unbroken,
contented
purr.
Back up those stairs
I creep so
I do not
disturb.
— C.Birde, 7/18