Peter Richardson: A Diptych

The Gleaners

There’s a touch of the travelling variety show

in the way they cause my dollar-store feeder

to buck over the heads of their associates

who scarf up what falls in the pivot and jab

of civic sparring that endears them to cranks.

They make me glad another exhausted July

has wrung itself out above my ravine as ten

seed bells are chewed to nothing in a few days

of wise-guy gobbling. So whose ravine is it?

And whose yard is roiling with blackbirds?

I assure you, I’m a squatter on this parcel

that tapers into pines, alders, and a beech

whose cantilevered lower branch they use

as a consulting perch from which to eye

tabbies too heat-frazzled to move a paw.

I’ll miss their deplorable manners the most.

The ten seed bells? Hyperbole. They don’t

eat more than any bunch of travelling birds

graced with brighter plumage. They plumb

the shadows and drag twilight over leaves.

I’ve torn into meals with the same rapacity

as their shrewd elders. And the juveniles,

who fledge inside the tubular supports

of traffic lights, take to familial haggling

with a cockiness I would do well to study.

Starlings Offer a Correction

Where does he get off claiming blackbirds

raise their young in the tubular supports

of traffic lights? No such thing occurs.

We inhabit those pipes, safe and dry,

one nest to a pipe mouth—revelers

gliding into cricket-filled waste lots

on our gob-stuffing adventures. Then

we’re back over four lanes of traffic,

turning what we’ve eaten into mush,

winging towards our hatchlings. See

how we stuff a couple of wing beats

into the last seconds before our toes

touch steel rims. Hubbub interlopers,

we serve notice on two-note blackbirds

skirmishing for seed in pensioners’ yards.

Peter Richardson of Gatineau, Quebec, was born in Norwalk, Connecticut and came to Canada in 1969. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Bit Parts for Fools, was a finalist for the 2014 Archibald Lampman Award. An earlier collection, Sympathy for the Couriers, won the 2008 QWF’s A.M. Klein Award. His poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Poetry Magazine (Chicago), and Poetry Ireland Review among others."The Gleaners" was previously published in The Malahat Review 187 (2014).