Cliff Swallow at Mesa Verde
By Joseph Hutchison
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
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Peeow, peeow, peeow, peeow—purrreet!
Each phrase of your swallow-song ends in praise—for rain-washed sky, rock-folds, the trickle of springs, insects delicious on the wing. Nothing, you insist, to be gained by stillness … so you take to the windy canyon shadows high over kivas and cliff-houses, rise, flutter, dither, swoop—a wide loop old as the world. Do you remember that girl under the slanted cave roof, watching you? She grew, loved, labored, and died watching you. How many such girls before the decades of drought, the long diaspora? How many Anasazi births and deaths while you— eternal bird—feasted on frantic ants, cedar beetles, wasps and crickets, and then lifted away in pursuit of some irresistible cloud? Escaping your home, age after age, you’ve wandered, flying wildly toward the outer edge of time and back to the nest of this moment—singing.... |
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate (2014-2019), has published 20 collections, most recently Under Sleep’s New Moon; The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; and Marked Men. His poems have appeared widely in journals—including Adirondack Review, New York Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, and Pedestal—and in numerous anthologies, including New Poets of the American West and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. He directs the Professional Creative Writing online program at the University of Denver’s University College and lives in the mountains southwest of Denver.