Poem meme

[cosmic_celery]

Here's the "when you see this, post a poem in your journal" meme. For this, you need to know that a grackle is a bird, and it sounds like THIS.

Theory of Beauty (Grackles On Montrose)
by Mark Doty

Eight o'clock, warm Houston night,
and in the parking lot the grackles
hold forth royally, in thick trees

on the lip of traffic, and either
they're oblivious to the street-rush
and come-and-go at the Kroger

or else they actually like it, our hurry
a useful counter to their tintinnabulation.
Now one's doing the Really Creaky Hinge,

making it last a long time;
now Drop the Tin Can, glissando,
then Limping Siren, then it's back

to the Hinge done with a caesura
midstream, so it becomes a Recalcitrant Double Entry.
What are they up to, these late, randy singers,

who seem to shiver the whole tree in pleasure
when somebody gets off a really fierce line,
pirate aerial deejays remixing their sonics

above the median strip all up and down
the block from here to the Taco Cabana?
They sample Bad Brakes, they do

Tea Kettle in Hell, Slidewhistle
into Car Alarm, Firecracker with a Bright Report,
and every feathered body --
how many of them are there,

obscured by dense green?
seems to cackle over that one,
incendiary rippling, pure delight,

imperious, impure singing:
traffic in tongues, polyglot,
expansive, awry.

Comments

[alycorn.livejournal.com]

This is an awesome poem!

One, because 'tintinnabulation' is such a fun word to say, and two, because I can pull to mind each and every one of those grackle-sounds. Oh, grackles.

(Also I feel an affinity with the poet because I shop at Kroger)

[cosmic-celery.livejournal.com]

Hee, glad you like it. I really love mark Doty's poetry. Before I read this one, I didn't know what a grackle was. We don't have them over here on the West coast (nor, for that matter, do we have Kroger XD)

And after Poe's "The Bells", this is the only other poem I've read to use the word tintinnabulation - which is indeed a great word!

You can hear Mark Doty reading another of his poems called "Pipistrelle", about a bat and poetry, HERE (just click on the thing that says POD). I don't know about you, but I always find it interesting to hear a poet reading their own work - gives more of a sense of who they are, I think.