Old Woodpecker
We had a visitor the other day, knocking on a large Douglas Fir tree that stands in our front yard. It amazes me how a bird, light and delicate, can hammer at a hard tree like that, stabbing into the bark, without turning its brain into pulp. There's a poem called Old Woodpecker that reflects on this, the theme is a long and hard life. The woodpecker stopped from time to time, it found bugs to eat. I pecked away at the Internet, but could not find a copy of the poem to post alongside the picture.
2 comments:
Old Woodpecker
by Paul Zimmer
(from The Great Bird of Love,
University of Illinois Press)
In the end, his tiny eyes won't focus.
Punchy, his snap gone, he spends his
Time banging on gutters and drain pipes.
He begins to slurr and churrrr,
His breath descending in a rattle,
He tells endless stories of old trees
Taken, but he has absorbed one too many
Hardwoods to his noggin, his brain
Is pudding. For the rest of his time
He will undulate around, patronized,
Spunky but sweet, remembering only
Nests of teeming carpenter ants,
Consenting grubs under flaps of bark,
The days when he was a contender
Amongst the great woods of his life.
That's the one. My old boss had a copy on his desk. I always wondered what that meant to him.
Post a Comment