Flyway by Robert Demaree

1.
I told myself I would not write
A poem about not writing poems.
Well into my 82nd year
I have seen most of what I
Expect to see,
No need to pretend, like Monet,
That each angle of the sun
On the bird feeder is different.
And yet:
I am right—that is a woodpecker,
Gray stripe up his back.
My wife will look to see what kind—
Hairy, downy, pileated,
An attention to detail
That has served us well
These many years.
By the shore the kingfisher
Awaits his prey, built to disdain
The food we have set out,
Unaware that his name
Puts us in mind of
That old radio show—
Not curious at all, is it,
How what was thought funny then
Seems disgraceful now.

2.
By this time in August
The blackbirds have gone,
We don’t know where.
Not missed, they eat
More than their share,
The flash of red what makes them
Less objectionable than grackles.
It is breeding time for the goldfinches,
Their young, lots of them,
In bright yellow swarms at the feeder.
Are their parents fearful,
Are they anxious about leaving home?

The sign at the town high school
Says “Freshman Jumpstart” this morning.
There will be 14-year-olds
Worried about their attire,
Will someone sit with them at lunch?
I supervised days like this
For many years
And think it just as well
That someone else
Does it now
While I fill the birdfeeders.

3.
The new book of poems
Has a blue heron on the cover.
Across the pond at Golden Pines
I can see two of them,
One metal, one real,
One resting, just landed,
The other a work of someone’s hand,
Beyond the trees I spot
A Fedex cargo plane
Making its approach with enormous slowness,
And I can picture the C-5A,
How it hangs in the heat of late afternoon,
Against a round low sun over Cobb County,
In Georgia, in 1968.
This plane would carry materiel
To troops in places where they will die.
In Kroger’s the wives of British engineers
Complain of being sent home.
The C-5A shares with the blue heron
A grace of hugeness and slowness,
If not of intent.
We have watched it from test flight
To obsolescence
And then to emerge from mothballs,
Things we’d as soon not know,
Poems written and forgotten.



Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders, published in June 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club, and have appeared in over 150 periodicals. A retired educator, he resides in Wolfeboro, N.H. and Burlington, N.C.