REDBIRD IN CEDAR
A cardinal, puffed out, incarnadine,
cockade upright in the hard,
cold wind and failing winter light.
His spring song unthought, unspun,
snowbound. His world limited.
This cedar tree, this fence row.
His face to the world, defiant.
Winter will not claim him.
Life itself, greedy, persistent,
blazes through the evergreen.
AT THE CANNON’S MOUTH
You stand with your head at the cannon’s mouth,
framed under a sky stretching beyond the field of focus,
your smile welcoming all the world’s possibilities.
I am present by absence and implication: the hands
that hold the camera, the object of your smile.
It was fall in Williamsburg; the colors were brilliant,
beyond capture, beyond memory, but the truth of that day
lies neither in memory nor photograph, but in a shoebox
on a shelf, in the negative of the image, where we will
always be for each other what we were and were not.
RADNOR LAKE: LATE SUMMER
The lake is carpeted in gray-green.
Duckweed drifts unmoored
across brown patches of water,
worn linoleum showing
the earthen floor beneath.
Seven deer stand knee-deep
in the blooming water,
ears pivoting forward and back,
mouths dripping duckweed,
they reap the summer harvest.
I stand in the shade of a rangy hackberry,
dazed in summer torpor, watching
five ducks glide across still water,
tin targets in a carnival shooting
gallery, heedless of the coming fall.
A PRAYER FOR WINTER BONES
The woods and fields are crusted
with a light snow, broken by patches
of brown grass and fallen leaves.
I walk, head down, listening
to the sharp notes of sparrows
and towhees, the rustle as they scratch
vainly in the dry leaves, hopping
and flitting in the honeysuckle thicket,
once a fence row, now rusted and broken,
sagging on locust posts without footing.
An irregularity stops me. A line of brown stems
where wild flowers bloomed in August
becomes frail ribs, the skeleton of a young deer,
intact, settled down in the leaves,
as though kneeling to rest. The rictus
of teeth in its jawbone unsettling.
My presence, my gaze, intrude,
desecrating this rough sepulcher.
I bow my head and ask forgiveness,
as a red-tailed hawk on an oak limb above
scans for life in the glistening meadow.
BLOSSOMS FROM A TRUMPET VINE
Blossoms from a trumpet vine
float like orange teacups on the glassine
surface of the lake at dawn,
as if part of an ancient ritual
known to western eyes only
from a nineteenth-century woodblock print,
where women in kimonos,
silent faces white with rice powder, bow
and pour tea into cups set
for seated, unsmiling men in black robes.
Welcome this moment, hold it.
Let water be water; flower, flower.
Be still. Orange blossoms float
upright on the lake. Accept this small gift.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Kevin Norwood has been published in Natural Bridge and studied creative writing with Peter Taylor and John Casey.
