This Nest, Swift Passerine [excerpt]

Dan Beachy-Quick

But how find how as it flew onward
& the mountains gave back the sound
to say what I mean the call of the bird
& the echoe after to say I've seen?

Raven hungers and calls and the mountain
Hungers back and calls
The whole range of peaks in the bird's beak.
Raven lonely and the mountain rings
Loneliness & the echoe after we could see
him no longer 

The echo after we could see 	Light in echo the eye sees
also through the ear 		a double infinity

Onta

No ceremony for the initiation into facts—
Only patience that is not time. The fist
Of the mind grows roots and greens into a fern.
The fern of the mind suffers a solar age
And becomes what it suffers—the sun is not
A star, but a flower. A voice in the eternal
Honey says, What is needed is to think with the flower

Dan Beachy-Quick

2022

Portrait (After Arcimboldo)

I made this self all by myself
I drove this nail into the wall myself
I stained the wood’s grain I planed the wood myself
I wrote the book on the shelf I made myself

The very fact is the face of the made thing
A fact is that it’s hard to see the face from within the thing
I want to say the face is a thinking thing
But the fact is that a face only thinks it is a thinking thing

Dan Beachy-Quick

2018

Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird

^{—for R.C. Quick}

I saw him in the summers when the leaves were green.
Down by the lake where ivy covered the ground. Where
The dogwood’s new pale moon flowers browned
At the edge by brittle June. I saw him then
Fishing for lake trout throwing the sunfish too bony
Back. The sun moved across the sky, around the earth,

Dan Beachy-Quick

2018

Poems

This Nest, Swift Passerine [excerpt]

More by this poet

Onta

Portrait (After Arcimboldo)

Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird

Poems

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This Nest, Swift Passerine [excerpt]

More by this poet

Onta

Portrait (After Arcimboldo)

Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird

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