Three Poems

 Linda Tomol Pennisi

 

CROW SHADOW

 

The crow flung a black triangle across the sun and shadowed her father’s face

as he slept on the deck, and he woke suddenly, stunned, shaken, as if

something dark and unexplainable had happened, something the words It was

a bird couldn’t touch, as if something unspeakable had risen from the cloud-

shrouded mountain and flown over the field where his boyhood pony once

stepped into a nest of bees and threw his small body into a gold mess of tall

grass beneath which the ground was dark and hard, and where he lay still

for a long while, before he could stand and walk again.

 

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HINGE

The days when nothing happens.
No deaths or births.

Nothing fruit or nut-sized discovered
growing in anyone’s body.

One squirrel chases another up an oak.
Beans soak in a dented metal pot.

A heft of sun unhinges the day’s gray lid
and within that yellow swell, a deer

in morning’s herd lifts her head
and studies the close,

unusually quiet dog at the fence.

 

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WORDWATCHING

She wished she were a birdwatcher, the real kind with a hat and hiking boots, binoculars, a small book in her hip pocket, and a thousand bird songs arranged in tiny labeled boxes in her brain. But instead she was a porch sitter, a wonderer, and as the birds whirred and flapped and warbled and chirped, sometimes she got up from her chair—or even stood on her toes on the upstairs porch—to find the throat the call was coming from. And sometimes she could even identify the bird—robin, finch, cardinal, wren—and other times she’d try to listen through a breeze, or calm, that she might discern a bird’s identity through intuition, as if a small boat in her ear’s canal might carry her from darkness to a minuscule box inside the bird’s bright throat, and she might bend to read it.

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