Lycidias Haibun
unfriendly you bird in your blackberry sonnet wearing out my life
simple faith licensed to take in life our love’s amour as if in a lapstrake hull shiny with a coating of beeswax to staunch any leaks, venturers and roisterers alike are rocked asleep in the blossom of each wave
birds in their bonnets of blackberries and cherries, I mean their sonnets
and it was all heaven on earth, indifferent to corollary results and causes bunched like mussels in their black visors on pilings driven into the marly bottom of the bay on which blue-claw crabs waited for the day’s catch to be cleaned and gutted, drifting down into outspread claws
you hulls plaited against metal night rains, you waves in nail-polish dawns
embrace us in this loosely threaded epic, a plea to remember what was shadowed on the hillside, washed in the apples, the tenet of unconsidered life, its witnesses torn away, their small cries staved in hold fast a few syllables in their brief blossom