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Poems by Maryann Siebert

AN AGORAPHOBIC AT NIGHT | THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND NED

Maryann Siebert, a freelance writer and teacher, taught writing at Rutgers University-Newark for many years. Now, she is teaching English and creative writing in Bergen County. Maryann is published in Lips, Paterson Literary Review, The New York Times, and various educational journals.

AN AGORAPHOBIC
AT NIGHT

--for Nancy

In spring snow

when forsythia showers the split rails,

it blazes sunless days in memory of you

in the green rain of April

like a beekeeper gathering at night--

clippers in hand, nipping at bark,

pinching green intestines raw.

Barehandedly, you tear at the branches.

I can almost smell your laughter,

your midnight landscape--

hedgeclippers waving at the moon.

Your feverish night dance in the garden,

days turned out, countering clockwise,

time in reverse.

Raise fistfuls of forsythia high,

my Sufi dancer,

and like a divining rod hold them steady.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND NED

Turkey vultures stand by the roadside

near Cranberry Lake in Sussex.

I think they are pheasants at first

but they are heavily shouldered and beaked.

I try to superimpose images of Canada geese

on these thugs but they will not expose.

At the Raptor Trust in Chatham, the turkey buzzards return,

a virtual photo op this time, a still life.

In one chicken wire coop, the dedication reads:

"For Uncle Ned, A Lover of Birds." Now Ned

never expected to be memorialized by vultures--

torn bald eagles, perhaps, or snowy egrets

snatched from the ice, but never by vultures.

I imagine Ned loved to hunt for pheasants,

trance the occasional misflight of the geese

over the Great Swamp, pretend to hunt for ducks

in season, but love vultures? You know the kind

of bird I mean, waiting on street corners for carnage--

a mob, milling around preparing for descent,

repeating the pattern in ever-widening circles of suspense.

Fair, even to a fault, Ned would catch this injustice.

"Fear, why fear?" he'd ask. Even vultures have the right

to live, to be cared for when talons snap and plastic lodges

in unsuspecting throats. These creatures are unhappy

in confinement, unhappy with their broken wings, their tinker-toy perches.

He would remind us that vultures feed on carrion

and "sweep the streets of geese mess."

When their wings and talons are mended, Ned, will they

still have a wing span of six solid feet?

Will they fly like barn owls on a winter night,

the moonlight shining on their soft or bumping landings?

And Ned, don't they itch like all of us for the clean air

of open space?

Copyright © 1999 by Maryann Siebert. All rights reserved.

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