Dark Wild Realm by Michael Collier Page A

DESNOS USED TO COMMEMORATE GEORGE "SONNY" TOOK-THE-SHIELD, FORT BELKNAP, MONTANA
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I have dreamed of you so much, you are the headless hawk
I found in a field, upturned
like a plow blade of feathers.
"Pick me up," you said, "so I might roost
as if I were the hawk."
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I have dreamed of you so much,
a tree grew where I stood,
and grass rose up in flames
as if the hawk had sown a fire
from which its head appeared.
"Pick me up," it said.
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I have dreamed of you so much
that now there is no dream,
no field or tree or fire,
only you roosting in the air.
"Pick me up," I say, "so I might roost
as if the world consumed my head."

BIGGAR, SCOTLAND, SEPTEMBER 1976
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Our visit to MacDiarmid ended
with him drunk and asleep
at the end of an afternoon
in the cool, south-facing croft
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and with his wife enraged
at our filling his glass
he held out begging
whenever she left the room,
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yet how charming she'd been
about the Cornish and Welsh,
though not so charming
about the rest, while MacDiarmid
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kept returning to the subject
of basalts—the ones on the Scottish
coast that matched ones in Canada.
But that was after he'd told us
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about his trip to China with Greene
in the forties or fifties,
booze-fueled but still something
that had never lost its scent
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as a dream. This man of science,
this communist, beautiful
in a starched white shirt,
who'd been propped up for us
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in a chair, one hand cupping
an ear, the other clutching
a handkerchief, and his eyes
alive at the sight of your hair.

MEDEA'S OLDEST SON
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I loved the sound of running water,
a fountain in winter, moss on the steps.
I'd gather pebbles from the courtyard
and drop them in the sacred well
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to watch their colors change.
Time's portion was so small to me,
like the riffle of a current.
Water led me to her:
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the way it moved with her anger,
also her love. My father kept a plan
inside his head. Its shape was like
the trellis where the birds nested.
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In that world the children of demigods
were doomed, and if I survived,
who would be left to love?
No one knows anything until he dies.
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The stones I dropped into the well
rest on the bottom, and the water
over them hasn't spoken, and so—
stone- and water-silent—and so, and so.

LOST HORIZON
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They would come, blown off course, in their wheeling,
spiraling, then hovering, trash-like flocks,
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and settle on the weekend seas of irrigated fields and parks,
like ducks on ponds too shallow for paddling—
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or from a distance they might seem to float, though
in another sense held up by mirage and meniscus,
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which meant you had to blink, refocus, to see what was
or wasn't there. Occasionally, in their midst
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something bold, big-billed, and broad towered above them,
whose wings cast shadows large enough
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to make its own weather, a foreigner among so many strangers.
And this was my first taste of the floods and plagues,
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the rain that would not end over the unprepared lands.
And yet the birds, lifting one by one, retraced what they had
      been,
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while filling up the emptiness they had made, returning
to wherever they had come, if such a place existed for so many.

AUBADE
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Quietly the mornings used to start
as if the breath escaping from our mouths
was meant to fill the room
and that would be the day's requirement:
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a volume equal to its space, arriving
as the sun arrived. Then we could hear
the sparrows fussing in the pyracantha,
the river of traffic from the freeway.
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Then the wonder of the moment was that
the day made room for us at all.
But now we know the place, the numbered
hairs, and have seen the figures of ourselves
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along the road, searching for the street
that leads into the avenues, then through
the intersections with their crossing guards.
Look how far into the day we've moved
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and yet we're still in bed, awake, silent.
Escape
or
stay
I used to tell myself,
waiting for you to shift