Jeff Baker

 

Long rain, the air unwieldy
with worm-must, spring mush, apple-
simmerings, a fishlip of

moon waxing black, one star
raveling its wick-light down
to the flood-line, varicose

gutters’ currents of offal—
crushed butts, san-salt, leaf decay—
dawn breaking through the tree line,

robins like blood-stars scared up,
branches finned, or seal-handed
with gold-green buds—visible,

becoming, and dawn-steady
the light pushing, light pushing
through the tree line like a riot

squad, light quarantining the
scrub-brush thickets out of shade,
air becoming wavery

with evaporate, rising
water-fume over the turned
soil and wheat-shear, over

winter’s broken ice-sutures,
and day now a conception
pressing outward flesh-colored,

dawn, lowering the stomach
of it somewhere to the west,
day now with its styluses

ratcheting up over grooved
twig-and-string nests, orange-lines
warbler mouths prised open—

carnivorous flowers—young
feathered in wet dandelion-
shag, sleep-bobbing—sudden throat

musculature corseting
Down on its song, then marsh frogs
Pick-up blustering at chest-

throat sails, grackles serrating
the airwaves, nearby suburbs
revving for commute—emptying

away from this landscape, its
flesh and feather fattening
out with sound, its screech-caw-lilts,

thin peep-peeps strained from needle-
sized wind tunnels, meat-fetter
bird tongues fire-flickering in

tooth-sized beakes—yellow-breasted,
ruby-rumped, black-throated.

 

Jeff Baker grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee in a place called Smokey Branch. His writing has benefited from the insights of brilliant friends and mentors at Tennessee Tech (B.S.) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A.). His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Washington Square, and Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee. Whoop & Shush, his debut book, was chosen by Dorianne Laux for the Idaho Prize for Poetry and is available from the University of Washington Press.

This is an earlier version of the poem. It appears in final form in his collection Whoop & Shoosh.