Crossbills

Crossbills

                                    If I could be like Wallace Stevens

                                                the octopus would be my model.

                                   —William Stafford

I searched a long time for octopus,

and found only one discarded poem.

But then, time is only temporary, right?  

So what’s the big deal? 

Each morning the Octopus Man

comes to the beach at Veracruz

with his rusty bike and a daughter  

to guard it while he wades to the edge

of the tide with curved hook and keen eye.

When I ordered Caldo de Mariscos

I learned the more you chew octopus

the bigger it grows.  Maybe

Wallace knew that when he wrote

about blackbirds and rusty crows,

the old sun gone, deep January, a hard

sky—“Bad is final in this light,”

Here at Honeybrook January blows

away, no possum, no crows,

but crossbills come to pluck seeds

from my feeder in the afternoon.

                              —Donnell Hunter

                                        19 January 2012