What’s Wrong With Me
Is what’s wrong with a hummingbird caught in the open,
beaten to the ground
by March hail-storming the coast,
amphetamine heart arrested in the sand.
She buries it, drawing a circle lined
with gull feathers, kelp, pebbles, shells.
I say a few words stupidly
asking which species–Anna’s or Rufus?—
before we return to the potpourri-mildew
nuanced room, and queen bed
with its gaudy autumnal duvet,
plus balcony and ocean view.
Afterwards, when I say I don’t see you
as the earth goddess type,
she shoots me
a look, tosses off the sheets,
slides into her jeans, “haven’t you ever wept
for a pet you had to put down,
or a thrush who crashes the window,
beak crushed, lying on the ground
crying out—more likely, simply crying—
while the ginger tomcat slinks
through the wood-sorrel?”
Two seal cows sleeping
on rocks at low tide, look up from their nap,
care nothing for my answer,
nor feel the need to clap.
When You Meet Your Maker, Try Writing a Sonnet
The ambulance siren dopplers its way
out of darkness into lyric. Flurries drift
under a streetlight dome. I’m splayed
on a gurney, pain-level 8, not getting the gist
of night geese calling above. I used to mock
the hackneyed seasonal clichés, the L.L. Bean
catalog plaids, the wooden decoys on the mantle,
and yet I’ve always looked for meaning
in the sound of his whittling blade, in the smell
of sugar pine shavings, a freshly carved neck.
Alas, he’s a jealous, angry, whirlwind of old man stench,
with a drinker’s nose and shredded-wheat beard
sheathing a whetted tongue—and just as I feared:
sculpting knives and a jar of glass eyes on his workbench.
Born in Detroit, by now a long-time Oregon resident, David Hargreaves is a poet, translator and linguist. Most recently, his translation of Chittadhar Hrḍaya’s River, from Nepal Bhasa, the endangered, ancestral language of the Kathmandu Valley, appeared in the anthology River Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series, 2022). His own work, Running Out of Words for Afterwards, (Broadstone Books) earned a starred review from Kirkus Review, appearing in its top 100 indie press books of 2022. Other poems appear in a wide variety of journals, including American Journal of Poetry, Passages North, and Catamaran. For more info go to his website here.
