Scavenge

by Anita Sullivan

The Anna's hummingbird sitting on the willow twig
makes a private, smug little sound
like gargling zippers. She is taking a break
from her hourly scan of the few remaining
Salvia microphyla blossoms, the October
holdouts. The usual summer spats are
largely gone, the birds finally able to honor
the social distancing their protocol demands,
but high energies cannot tolerate.

Poke! Poke! goes the black-scimitar beak
in what must be a version of scraping
the pudding from the bottom of the bowl.

Too Much With Us

by Anita Sullivan

I jump into the hinge of light leaning open
against the Japanese Maple's trunk,

August grass hay-colored and inert upon the yard,
with no agenda,
reflecting nothing.

(This is where laughter resides
its mansion of fireflies).

The setting sun a serpent's tongue across the dessicated grass,
feeling for reflections, strikes
horizontal against the sunflowers in the raised bed, most of them
facing the wrong direction
for their own good reason,

reminds me of yesterday

the photos
on the wall of the eye doctor's room
the black holes in the exact center
of the rayed orange circles – how the eye resembles
(when photographed thus) – a sunflower
how the pupil, dark with seed-threads
inadequately
contracts to avoid blindness, counts on us
to always turn away.

Either/Or

by Anita Sullivan

Frog! No!
Two assumptions in a
split skirmish.

Second stomps out first
like a fire
although they emerge
as one.

Dried oak leaf on the path
exact size,
curled, supple, back-sloped, diffident,
poised
as a Pacific Chorus Frog (wrong color)
but
not imagined
not disguised.

Yesterday, tomorrow
might have been
Frog? No!

But today equal,
no tilt.

Could blame the adolescent light
banging around among
the lichen, now exposed
in the winter oaks. Or

deep and chronic
frog-hunger
aroused under the heart-rock
keeping the balance right.

Beak

by Anita Sullivan

The bird sings.
See the beak vibrate, almost a blur, as if it were
flexing like a fiddle string, which surely it must not be.

The bird sings.
There is a happy certainty, as the small body endures
continuous aftershocks from this seismic event,
that the violence will do it no damage – no more
than an orgasm will harm a human, and in fact. . . .

An overwhelming
mistaken for temporary,
for verging on, for disparity, for ad hoc, for incomplete – .
Which could have led to a chaff of tiny bones at the bottom of a cliff
making nary an etch in the document of stones.

Instead, an end run around order to ecstasy.

Sings through a prow that drills a future into air:
lower bill falls and rises, upper bill holds
(barely keeping the angle acute),
not making the sound per se, but mollifying
something.

As if the beak assumes temporarily a role other than its
assigned . . . ingesting.
Like a fisherman pressed into performing
an emergency appendectomy on a kitchen table
because he has some familiarity with guts.

Will sit in for flute, for falling water, for castanets – .