The Glimpse
Blackbirds dart
from branch to rain gutter
and back again.
The cottonwood shudders
as they pin their bodies
to her limbs
and just as suddenly
alight opaque wings
to leave en masse.
The moving form
flutters, hovers,
then is abandoned.
The untethered clouds
roll past the roofline too,
as if
giving chase, ripping this
small tear in the sky
wide open.
We can leave or be left,
it seems, see or be seen, this is
the inside and out of blackbirds,
a quickening--
I feel again the shock of birds
your crazy dog
chased off the cold knoll.
It’s the scatter of your laugh,
your ashes.
Jessica Cohn has studied poetry at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, at the Tannery Arts Center, in Santa Cruz, at the Catamaran Writers Conference, in Pebble Beach, and in various writing groups in the Central Coast area. She thanks every poet she has ever read or met, especially those kind enough to workshop her lines.
Blackbirds dart
from branch to rain gutter
and back again.
The cottonwood shudders
as they pin their bodies
to her limbs
and just as suddenly
alight opaque wings
to leave en masse.
The moving form
flutters, hovers,
then is abandoned.
The untethered clouds
roll past the roofline too,
as if
giving chase, ripping this
small tear in the sky
wide open.
We can leave or be left,
it seems, see or be seen, this is
the inside and out of blackbirds,
a quickening--
I feel again the shock of birds
your crazy dog
chased off the cold knoll.
It’s the scatter of your laugh,
your ashes.
Jessica Cohn has studied poetry at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, at the Tannery Arts Center, in Santa Cruz, at the Catamaran Writers Conference, in Pebble Beach, and in various writing groups in the Central Coast area. She thanks every poet she has ever read or met, especially those kind enough to workshop her lines.