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Published May 21, 2003 at 4:00 a.m.
There's not enough light yet to know
what color they are, but all the flowers
are moving. Now the blossoms
dissolve, now they are birds,
their pale gray fluttering on hundreds of branches.
Of all the possible forms -- indefinite
millions -- these birds
swaying in drunken clusters on crabbed, fermented fruit;
their talk, small and intimate.
I try to step inside
but the whole thing wobbles and
takes off, a canopy
of feather, leaf, and petal in the shape of
a tree. All the words
fly out of the room. Whatever there was,
I might have stayed in this world
forever without seeing them,
or feeling their giddy
arrival in my skin, or tasting
in my mouth the color in the tree.
-- Nora Mitchell
Published in Contemporary Poetry of New England: An Anthology
ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini (University Press of New England, 2002)
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