There are so many fewer
trains now.
Our house is tall
and porous and the
chucking trains, shrilling
warnings to
rail walkers, fishermen, drug
dealers, dog walkers
until now have
punctuated our days as the
shrill metallic
hunks of freights
disturbed our sleep
for twenty years
now. Now, silence.
Barges barrel
courses up and down
stream, tall as our roofline
now. Hulls porous and
rusty with flaking
registrations from the Maldives
and Malta, forced along by
brightly trim tugs,
nannies pushing prams now.
The wake they cut
white-cap waves
on river banks where
families now skip
rocks, poke
sticks. Clustered like
tulips. Now
clans isolate as if their
piece of rocky beach
were stall or cubicle.
And birds! The quietude
of deaths made lovely
now by robin song.
Pileated woodpecker
and baby mockingbird.
Now an eagle hovers on currents
over river; it looks like a
drone but flaps its wings, one slow beat.
//////////////////
Celia Bland is co-editor with Martha Collins of Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan 2019). Her poetry was the subject of an essay by Jonathan Blunk in the summer 2019 issue of The Georgia Review. Her third collection, Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero) features pen and ink drawings by Japanese artist Kyoko Miyabe, and the title poem received the 2015 Raynes Prize. Her work is included in Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversation (Tupelo Press) and is upcoming in Plume, Posit, and Southern Humanities Review.
Lightwood 