Two For Don \ The Dancing Grounds

Alan:  My youngest brother’s was another April death, sudden, appalling.  Even now, 13 years later, I want him back: there's so much to tell him, so much to learn.

Two For Don

I. Timber Cove Road

The Thursday after you died

I was driving home

through showers that burst

in gusts of sleet:

tall clouds broken

by clean hard sun.

A rainbow was building

as I entered the woods,

and then it was there

off my right fender

between me and the trees,

between me

and the endless dark trees.

II. Aurora

I went out

and the hair of the night

was standing on end

above the huge forehead

of pale shining.

In the still air

all the animal sounds and people

and place sounds mingled:

a distant truck, a foghorn,

the grumbling tides, a million

yips and yowls.

The night

stood up on its hind legs

and everything on earth

was looking and

speaking in tongues.

Nancy:  They aren't beautiful.  They aren't beloved of poets as larks and nightingales are.  And yet, we wait and we wait for the first magic night when the woodcock rise up, and we seek them out in the deepening dusk - "There, there," we say.  THIS is spring.

The Dancing Grounds

Buddy ate a woodcock once;

his son shot it, “no bigger than a robin,

and it tasted like worms”.

Buddy’s no sportsman.  He and his sons

hunt and fish for the pot.

The small bones I found in the baked beans

were pa’tridge, and I don’t ask whose

ribs and knuckles these are.  I don’t ask

because Buddy and the boys hunt at night some,

quiet and careful.  The woodcock, though,

was a legal shot, a boy’s quick prideful

reflex kill.  Solemnly, they ate it.

It tasted the way alder swamps smell in the Spring.

Little thing, no bigger than a robin,

eight ounces maybe.  An estimated one million

are killed each year by sportsmen, city hunters

like the ones who parked their car in my lane

without by your leave; arrogant, noisy

men who remind me that poachers make good neighbors.

What’s left come back to the dancing grounds;

it’s not the robin with his cheerup, cheerily

that says Spring, here, it’s the woodcock falling

at dusk out of Orion to the dancing grounds.

And we keep them open, the abandoned pastures

and haphazard slopes where the woodcock dance.

Here’s time and sweat we can ill afford

and yet we can’t see nature take its course here;

we burn and saw and scythe against some gentle

muddy dusk of falling song.

Buddy met me at the door, and we tipped our heads

back at the twittering.  The woodcock are back

on the dancing grounds.  It feels like Spring.

“The Dancing Grounds” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984).