Excerpt from Seven-Star Bird

THE WORD

As brutally as bees drive their tongues to flower,
As gentle as that seems to us,
So let us live our ordinary dying,
This morning glory, this fiery star gone nod:

Here’s the pure tongue of words becoming
As they also pass away: Listen, then kiss me:
The last sound we’ll hear will be the silence
Of our first word finally formed, our first sweet and violent
     tasting.

THE FOUNDING OF FRIENDSHIP, TEXAS

The burial of Anna, age six months,
First dead in the new land,
Was a cause for celebration.
Not only had her soul—they saw it!—
Risen with a flock of scissortails
To join Mary’s virgin train above,
But they knew, being gamblers also
On the fleshy souls of cotton and maize,
That she did not, in fact, rise
But burrowed into the black soil
To mingle with eternity here.
After a year of traveling, the family
Could finally stop, for the love of Anna
And the promise of the land
She had become, land that rose so slightly
At the San Gabriel River,
Where the only trees in sight
Shimmer a string of emeralds
On the dusty breast of Friendship, Texas.

SUN, MOON, STARS, RAIN

Ever since the dam was begun
All roads but one wind out of Friendship,
Texas, and most of those are flooded,
Bridgeless, or wrecked by mesquite or dynamite.

What’s left of the jackrabbits, coyotes,
Coons, skunks, and the most stubborn ghosts
Takes a west road that is mostly clear.

My grandfather said the year the state tied ribbons
To the trees that God left on the same road,
Shaking his head, then my family, and now these…

The only road still leading in comes from above.
The sun rides on it, as does the moon,
The stars, and, occasionally, the rain:

These come freely to all places and never leave—
Even to the godforsaken, the soulless
And pastless, even to this shithole
Which is, at least, a place.

THE STAR-STEERED GEESE OF YANCY MILL, VIRGINIA

for Donald and Doreen Davie

Hundreds of geese gathered at the cow pond
Late that late fall afternoon, their barking
Barking hard against the mountains behind them:

They were so alive the day
Seemed to dawdle in its last light
Before it gave over to the first stars
That would lead the clambering V’s
Southward along the ridge.

I imagined the geese as drunken sailors
Headed for some fateful, ancient field, heroic
And loud, but now I let them go—as birds—
And think rather of those that waited behind
In the darker dark to fly in pairs, the full galaxy
Wheeling above them and the frost-lit grass below.

They were the heroes I was waiting for:
How terrifying it must have been, how beautiful.

When I think of them, I think of you,
As if your bodies, too, will pull through the air,
Be held by it, guiding by the strange fires of night.

Copyright 2003 by David Daniel. All rights reserved.