Steve Dieffenbacher

Presidents Day 2025

Three days after the big storm
the robins come brass-bellied
over languishing shrubs
and snowbound fields
to gather in flocks on a holly
still bright with berries.

They flutter and chitter, hide briefly
in its thorny leaves
only to reappear and soar to rooftops and trees
across the white fields,
swooping back to start again
in this icy noon of armored cloud.

Soon black-headed juncos
sweep in, too, peppering the ground with urgency,
tails flicking and rising at any sound
as towhees scratch calmly for seeds
under shadowy laurels.

And so spring’s harbingers feed and flit
as freezing storms rage to the east
and wave imperial shadow across the land,
one Anna’s hummingbird hovering at my window
in its blur of hope, pausing for a moment,
and whirring away.

Swimmer

Sun glimmers in bands across the water.
Hummingbirds hover over late afternoon.
I enter the water as an angled mirror,
the old metamorphosis of limb and brain
learned in adolescent pools. I barely breathe
in this slipstream of memory, the simple strokes
of weightlessness in an uncorrupted soup,
arms and legs lengthening eel-like out of a body
planar and slim, not finned nor scaled,
but at home again. There is no touching ground
after gliding back to this sea, the arch of shoulders
remaking the pliable, remembered membrane
of a beginning, seaweed waving again
toward antediluvian fish.

Steve Dieffenbacher’s full-length book of poems, The Sky Is a Bird of Sorrow, was published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 2012, winning a ForeWord Reviews Bronze Award for poetry. A poem in the book, “Night Singer, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico,” was named a 2013 Spur Award poetry finalist by the Western Writers of America, and his poem, “Emptiness,” won the 2010 Cloudbank magazine poetry prize. He also has three chapbooks, Intimations (2018), Universe of the Unsaid (2009), and At the Boundary (2001). He lives in Medford, Oregon, with his wife and their inscrutable cat Wild Thing.