Jeff Hilson (Walworth, London, UK): from Bird bird
From Bird bird
HIMANTOPUS HIMANTOPUS (black-winged stilt)
Everyone’s poems have birds in even mine. The jays are real workers at their job, he said, and fatter than any jays I ever saw before. The birds are batting by. Thank you we had a lovelyview of (the baroness, the baroness) everyone’s poems. I want to be simply the best we have too, and slow like the baroness, obscure and slow and carrying chips. So this one’sabout me and unexpectedly long. A startling drop from branch to branch. Those birds she said are startling. Tomorrow is Sunday and I am spotless and rose. Dear joe, a blackbird. Jim’s dead too. Everyone’s poems have birds in even mine.
FRINGILLA MONTIFRINGILLA (brambling)
Everyone’s poems have birds in except mine. Bastone! The rods split into two. In my dream I dreamed I was reading my poems as badly as this I’m glad it was just a dream. In a darkwood my piaggio did tumble down more than any other tree. Then they’re rubbish, the dells filled with dew again. Those happy days after the legions left. Rifiuti! Pale villagers them be in their homes who want for berries. I have seen the rest of the hedge and are all rhubarb. Two countrymen discussing grapes, two librans, the pines the pines. Rugiada, little girl, I don’t know which is touched more my vag or my heart.
PETRONIA PETRONIA (rock sparrow)
What will be my wild end, heads or tails. In the old days most of these small brown things did nominate larkin round and round. I want to be remembered fingers first. This strain, its allies, I confess. A little swollen through the volva I suspected the reverse below the surface but not “my old name.” Not in other words watchful of how ‘hence’ unfolds (yeah, in the area!), there were always, variously, spaces I could have gone for – from the cap but the cap was free; from the apex as if it were only one cap inside another; from the report that it was, which is “as it were,” a cup and not a cap. Caps and cups, cups or caps, this bird does not this little note require.
PORZANA PORZANA (spotted crake)
“We are hard to flush like cous-cous and small buttons. But when the distant throbbing of the coast drops in we must flush down, quickly, into the ditch. Now the ditch dominates. It’s darker here and colder than on the earth, the cous-cous is quiet and the small buttons, ha-ha, it just all looks dark and cous-cous sized.” And he breaks off slowly in a rail-voice. “Nothing demands close attention in itself.” First the moorhen then the bee spends less time in, the bee who has walked through like a weather bird a storm bird a rain bird. His left-hand name, my word-book, is a sign of land.
CICONIA CICONIA (white stork)
The landowner is coming now and harley is between beds. Harley come be found with shirley quickly. Come into the wilder-bed come from the form we fell in mixed up and the pheasant’s eye for nothing from the bright bikes lighting up the pissy-bed. We watched them as the lights came on but it was only an analogy the lighting of the pissy-beds, and they went out of old fields turned into golf-courses. It was ordinary shirley it was ordinary and so so everlasting. The white stork’s carriage arrived it came for nothing the poem was over and it was the end of spring. Spring involves plants in bulk. This is not a recipe.
LAGOPUS LAGOPUS (red grouse)
I struggle with the birds of the air but gaps are allowed with grouse everywhere in this crude survey. I mean it must be fed up my big red eyebrow. Lately a gate or pasture untended, sparser, unintended, I simply don’t know what I’m doing. I guess building it up rich, which the burry-man is too, but loading is just plain wilkinson, quick & vital. On the he heath our art hardly grows but see-see too the shoots of the she heath. With all this debris it’s filling up. “Crescent illae, crescent amores.” A.D. Hope is a cunt. Drinks occur. The turning bird is driven over. That it then fell, that it was finished ending in a leaflet sucker its got hips too.
© Jeff Hilson 2008
