He spoke the language of birds
of pickle ****
and lichen
and ailerons
and shutter speeds

Where I saw a blackbird with a spot of red on a wing

He saw Agelaius Phoeniceus a  passerine bird of the family  Icteridae found in most of  North America and much of  Central America

His mind and mouth were full of facts and figures
about wind
and lift
and tides
and the right time to plant and to harvest tomatoes

Music and science were things to be dissected
and perfected
and each thing was measured
and calculated
and intentional
like the metronome I played with on the piano in the spare room

I did not always understand him
I did not always try to learn

a kid dabbling in punk rock and drawn to graffiti will
I found it hard to relate to someone so exacting

But while I do not remember his laugh
I do remember his joy
at explaining the circuitry in a handmade airplane
or the minutiae of the wondrous geometric cellular structure of a pine cone

A hike in the sloughs and I ran ahead
while he kneeled and saw a tiny marvel, a flower or a lizard hidden by my hurry, tucked behind a leaf and revealed by his slow and patient attention

He taught us to see
To look close
To take the time to do it well

And while we bristled at the pocket knife,
cutting candy into enragingly tiny mouthfuls

he taught us to savor
and make the moments last

He never rushed a photograph
He never hurried though a museum
He never pushed you out after dinner
He sat
and listened
and truly saw you
in focus.

While his eyes blurred with age
And his ears failed him
He never stopped taking in the moment and he never stopped his ever and perfect focusing
On the thing in front of him, perhaps small but made large by his attention

The last time I saw him
he clearly
and directly looked me in the eye
and in his way
gave a blessing
passing on his focus

“Send those kids my love. Take care of them.”

And in those words
I understood him.

God
In her early days
Wandered
And squandered
her time doing nothing but reading
Going though the classics and trying to form a personal style
But as her professor mentioned one day, and which she jotted on the margins of her text,
It’s easy to be derivative

God feared nothing more
than being derivative
She wanted to be her own voice
And to do her own thing
And to avoid sounding like all the others
While she loved their work and poured over it, highlighting and marking her dog eared copies,
She wanted to be her own thing
Her own presence
Something new

And so stopped reading
And just walked into to the wilderness looking
And waiting
For inspiration to strike
To write a new thing

She just needed to start at the beginning
The rest would come

Her tears
Fell like a storm
Raging

The rest of us ran for cover, jackets over our head because we had left our umbrellas

Sometimes I can’t find the words
but I lay with you and rest
and find I don’t need them

It’s all said
in the slow breath and small touch of knees beneath the blanket.

As kids
we played in fields
miles and miles of of planned and planted crops
that held within them
hidden wilds  

At night
I lay in bed
terrified of the coyotes howling outside my window
prowling fields and stalking  through tall weeds
sniffing out the mice and ground squirrels
chasing cats and lurking
hunting creatures of the night
fearful creatures of the darkness

One night,
I woke to the howling
I listened bravely,
braver than before when I would hide under the blankets or call for my mom

I peaked out of my curtains into the dark
and there
immediately
were two yellow eyes staring back from the dark

I saw the faint gray of fur
saw its mass and presence
but then it blinked
and startled
and instantly faded into the night.

The next day
in the mud
just on the other side of the fence
I found a paw print
just one
a mark
that she had been there
two eyes
one paw

At night,
I heard the echoes and howls that sounded like a million imagined wolves,
giant snarling beasts fighting and hunting
hurling themselves against the fence
fangs and blood and wildness

At night
when I took out the trash
I ran like hell to the can and hurled the bag inside
panting when I got back to the front door, in the light

But that paw
in the mud
was so small
so
delicate

Weeks later
riding the bus to school
I saw a coyote
in the early morning fog
thin and small
rushing across the street and
almost struck by the bus

It ran into the orchard
the bus driver cursed under her breath

It was so fragile
how could that be so frightful?

Is fear this thing?
This monster in the dark but in the day does it run
from shadow to shadow
malnourished
with its tail between its leg?

Can it be hit by a bus full of children?
Does it lie in the ditch
and slowly bleed to death
after it misjudged the speed and distance and tried to make it
a tuft of hair stuck in the corner of the bumper
leaving nothing but a print in the mud
a small print
the only clue that it walked silently in the night?

Way out,
where there is nothing but walnut groves and train tracks,

the three of us found a place to cut loose
and be the punks we wanted to be.

Way out,
where we found a few patches of weeds, abandoned farm equipment, decayed foundations, a toppled barn, and a dry canal,

we brought  spray paint,
****** beer,
and threw rocks at the passing trains.
We built bonfires and howled and no one cared.

One day,
an old man
in a wrinkled hat  
pulled his truck in to the tall grass
and watched us.
We hid our cigarettes as if he cared.

I walked over
but before I could say hello or ask his name or give some poor excuse for our behavior,
he said,
“I was born here.”

Here?
Here, there was was nothing.
Old silos, maybe.
No houses.
No town.
No place to be born.
Just a place for kids like us to scrawl **** graffiti on pallets and rusted truck trailers, ditched and forgotten.

“Used to be a town,” he said.
“Your standing in the post office.”
At my feet the cement slab crumbled into the weeds.

It is here that I wish this poem was about a tender moment where an old man taught a young man about a hidden past.
Or that this poem reminded us about the secrets hidden all around us, if we just look.
It could be about a regained wonder for our elders or about memory or a certain flower that he pointed out which blooms in our ghost towns of nostalgia and how that flowers Latin name means something that becomes a grand metaphor for rebirth...

But it’s not and he drove off without another word.

We picked up our spray paint and threw beer bottles against the canal bank, shattering them in a place no one else would notice
except that old man,  
who would see my vulgarity
and poor attempt at artistic protest haphazardly sprayed
over the last place he can remember seeing his mother, by the backdoor,
that autumn evening he left and took that job in Sacramento.

A poem by Billy Collins always seems to have a twist, some humor or a pun waiting to make you chuckle or stop and wonder while holding your chin.

But now, I’m not surprised by his slights of poetic hand. He has tipped his hat one too many times.
Too many winks.
One can only enjoy a twist so many times.

What would really surprise me is not a poem about jazz that is really a poem about death, or some stanza about a Bird in the winter snow (but really about a distant mother or an Ornette Coleman song or a high school sweetheart)...

What would really stop me in my tracks is

A few simple words
A haiku or prose, a
Moment for its own sake.