This week’s poem, by Richard Foerster, brings us into a curious scene between a bird, a dog and a speaker observing them. I love the exquisite detail with which the watcher describes these creatures, and how the poem ends with a quiet meditation on what binds all three of them, “sworn / conspirators in the same creation.”

Foerster has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. For the last 34 years, he has lived on the coast of southern Maine.

 

Vesper Sparrow

By Richard Foerster

            Pooecetes gramineus

 

Clyde is old, he does not care

the sparrow—not a foot

from where his muzzle, flush

with the parched lawn, twitches

in faint awareness and snorts

up tiny clouds of dust—

is gleaning bristles of shed fur,

a whole sheaf now held

in her beak. Comical almost,

like a handlebar mustache,

tilting this way then that

as the bird eyes the ground,

intent, until full-burdened,

 

she wings off and dips behind

a knotted clump of grass,

only to return minutes later

and forage next among

the downy hairs between

Clyde’s shoulder blades.

The bird notes me noticing

but knows we three are sworn

conspirators in the same creation:

this business of quiet taking,

the measured weave, the fated cup

left on open ground, and the song

we’d have break toward evening.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Vesper Sparrow,” copyright © 2019 by Richard Foerster, from “Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems” (Tiger Bark Press) appears by permission of the author.

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