Herons

Sketch: Virginia Marsh


Heron
is eye
presence of
looking not
grace or might
sturdy middle.

Raven-cold
but less darkly
some measure of eagle
humbled

(talons become wind edge
breadth to scale gills or cleave
density, Virginia humidity)

richened thereby
enriched
richer, or
saturated reed
in the water

she
slow to flying
masterful knowing the marsh
and living
amid oblong
perimeters.















Heron

The bleak or
solemn
raven-cold, beam of iron
no-weight
rusted
endurable underneath-
how apply
ponderous human concept
of the ominous
or numinous
to simply the
weird presence
of eyes looking
manifest as body.

Heron.

Some old ditched house
with framed picture
of a gone person
on the mantle inside

it’s Nana Jo is in my mind
not looking at me or anything
always old wife to Bill
she sat in that chair, now

concerted to a stick upright in the marsh
and
into flying a
beard going gray or
a chest breathing sleep







Heron

does not find it funny
prefers the bog to
brown river, exposed to sun,
until blanched and molasses
the snakes are there.

cannot return to that previously happier time
before early afternoons were all
brick smokestacks
covered completely with ivy
in hot, hot,
July.

not a corner or the room but a turning
away from that isolation.

whose body is hardly even there
but lovely manners of blue that
gladden the senses without shame
in front of all the people a quietness
that will move the entire frame into
absence if one of us asked about anything.

a memory from nowhere of a tire rolling maniacally
down the paved hill and into someone’s fence

or back to the river where we went fishing with bread on hooks
for useless sunfish, there was a heron there,

and a few other times, for sure.

possibly if I looked I could recall each one ever seen,
could still turn the head away unnerved but
leave the eyes not fixed following the leaving

there was little to say