Rebecca

the first thing I thought of when reading this was Gwen MacEwen's 'The 
Red Bird You Wait For,' which might be in a book in the library there. 
It's much shorter.

And that's the second thing I thought about: although very powerful in 
places, I did find that it took awhile to get going; I admit I felt 
that the tightest, tautest section was the 2nd half, although I 
wouldn't edit (as you suggest yourself in a later post) all the first 
part, but I would try to cut it somewhat. Just not sure where exactly, 
but my feeling is it sprawls, which is fine, but somewhat too much....

OR: you might argue that the overwhelming rush of image & metaphor is 
precisely the point, that excess is what desire does....

  Doug
On 5-Feb-06, at 9:20 PM, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>
> I could say
> you are this red bird which flies by, lifting against the heavy weight
> of the rain which has turned the world grey, for days,
> as the water on the railing soaks my elbows,
> you fly by, crying out, improbably crimson! streaked as if you took a 
> bath
> in a canister of pain, and your wings and body rise and fall in a short
> ascending and descending, start and stop, as if the breath
> that your singing required made your flight hesitate, almost asthmatic,
> or I could say
> you are these geese which walk by, having fallen to earth, lost in
> a blizzard of storm, their wild honks circling
> going nowhere in a winter that was being penetrated by spring,
> thunder and lightning! and so they fell to earth and walk, loud
> making of defeat a triumph, down the snow-covered street,
> I could say
> you are that mockingbird I heard in summer, fleeing
> the sweat of my love for you going outside into the sweat
> of the August night, at 4 in the morning, shattering the quiet
> with innumerable cries, black and undisclosed in the blackness,
> of that nexus, that location that only my heart can locate, spinning
> around like a needle of iron in a basin of water, when the world
> is made of nothing but water, and the voices rise out in the dark,
> that finds you there,
> I could say, even when splashed with my blood,
> you danced like the young turkey buzzards that mistake
> their black and white feathers sprouting out of their heads
> for a permanent crowning, as if kings forever
> in the realm, of death, how murderous
> you were! and how savage!
> but you are not any bird,
> and if you say you are a bird, or if I say we both are,
> it is because of the singing like this,
> but I think it’s also because
> in the realm of birds, only plumage
> differentiates gender, there all gender is an appearance
> and a performance, birds have no penises, and their cloacal
> openings which in each are the same suffice,
> just as the opening between us,
> wound, or sweet sweat cunt, whatever, was enough
> to give birth to all these voices
> winding their way through the ruins, the small cities, the tormented
> small villages, which we also made, for the truth
> is you are not a bird,
> and when the red bird flies by, with its improbable
> song and color, or the geese make a triumph
> of where they must walk, or two mockingbirds
> become a forest of variegated voices, it is because
> I think of you, it is the only way
> I could touch you,
> as if the world touching me were your hands holding
> my face in your hands, as if
> in saying or singing
> as if I held your face in my hands, you know,
> o beautiful one, that face which you do not know, which
> persists, shining, beneath your masks, the gaze that you believe
> does not exist, even though it plumblines into the depths
> of all my strata and all the wells of darkest water, you who
> I know where you are, and how, and feel by mercurial
> ganglia and oxygenated breath rising out of the red marrow
> of the bones, even though no one else knows who you are,
> even though you don’t know who you are!  incredible woman
> I could say calling out in all the voices stolen and borrowed from 
> other birds,
> you are that tree I painted when I was too young to know
> I was dreaming, a strong reaching out of the earth, and each of its 
> branches
> was a bird, wide sweep of wing unfolding, heron type beak raised in 
> swirling
> song, five of them birds or branches, a tree of birds, and all with 
> the dancing
> of girls, you are that endless girl, shy with bold disclosures
> beneath every one of your siren painted masks, but
> the truth is you are none of these things,
> you are like no other being that has ever walked the earth,
> you are the only one
> I have ever loved like this, the only one that if you walked by
> and I were dead, my bones in the ground, moldering
> to worms and dust, would cry out at the touch of your footsteps
> and call out your name, the only one that is my weather, my 
> constellations,
> my waning and waxing moon, and the only one who has ever looked
> into my interior face, the only one my interior face
> has ever gazed upon, somehow, one night,
> when it seemed the universe held us finally, rocking together,
> in its oceanic palms, though it was only a dream, but such
> a reality that I do not know what to call you or how to call you,
> you only you, woman, who
> for one moment came into my woman’s arms,
> and who can sing of this, and in what language, where
> what is feared is not death but the beginning of life,
> which arrives as never more than a dream
>
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320

No farther out
than in –
no nearer here
than there.

	Robert Creeley