A sea bird here in the piedmont
A good two hundred miles from the coast
Or at least some sandpiperish thing
I’ve never seen before around here
Long legs and prominent narrow beak
I thought at first it might be a roadrunner
Visiting from the desert
Whitman called a mockingbird
A visitor from Alabama
But that was the nineteenth century
When nature still spoke

The carpenter bees have supplanted the honey bees
All bees are industrious but those give no sweetness
And should be called excavators not carpenters
For they build not but only drill down
It’s not their fault
That they love porches

And was this a factor that contributed
To the nauseous vertigo
Or maybe just the inevitable consequence
Of absence from the training session
A toe box a risk assessment a prosthesis

The beauty of the cardinal
Red tinged with gray
A sex attractant

And the little subdivisions barbing off the main drag
With their similar logos and similar-sounding names
Compounded of a limited pool
Of coves glens chases woods closes meres dales groves squares and harbors
Again the nearest real harbor hundreds of miles aloof
And squares are shopping centers
I even saw a loch once in the deep south

And you really shouldn’t drive
With your head in such a spin
Or any spin at all
Watch out for the deer
That inhabit these suburbs
That leap so gracefully over the fence
And onto the road

Somebody’s horn at a stately
Fifty beats per minute
Until they find the fob apparently find the button
To shut it off
And the execrable two-stroke leaf blower
Audible even with the air conditioning on

Yes but the visibility is good
With only a little haze
If only there were some distinguishing features
The bird had a ring around its neck
If that helps