The Blackbird Lesson

THE BLACKBIRD LESSON

The blackbird song fell on the afternoon,
as assault not just the come-hither
of the April male or June's border warning shots,
but merrily like a composition,
a Mozart firing himself to ever more grandiose
variations on a theme, but the ghost of some whole
partly remembered. The blackbird stopped.
In silence came the second ghost,
a memory of the pedaling upright
on the dining room's threadbare Oriental,
the window bay framing a massive oak stump,
another oak already dying, my sister going
through scales painfully, then a little faster.

William Logan in
The Atlantic Monthly, April, 2014, page 83.

A squirrel has chewed the A T & T line and our internet is BROKEN. This post is from the phone and I cannot get the photo on top. But I liked this poem much better than those I usually find in magazines. Back tomorrow, I hope!