Ruffed Grouse Feeding on Moonseed Berries

← v10n1, Spring 2011

Three of them, one watching us, wise head turned

so its eye, a wet black moon, fills. The spring

of its body, half-hidden, drums bare ground

behind a fallen leaf. But two—fanned wings,

leaning close like Romeo and Juliet about

the other, whose talon has ripped the turf—

levitate. Their necks, breasts stretch up and out,

beaks, in hunger, part, and in the abrupt

white sky that must be summer’s longest hour

blue moonseed hangs luscious, gravid, lewd

almost, the magnetic, shivering glamour

of these songless ones, feathers like truths

no one but sweet dreamers attend, a riff

of joy never snatched by the unseen hawk,

or gobbled by rat, or toppled, stiffed

by the thick-bellied rattler coiled upon rock.

Audubon’s plate 120, American triad,

two redeemed, nearly, one left, and empty

heaven, untouched paper, moon’s acid,

blistering glow waiting on all that will breed.

nature animals

Dave Smith

Dave Smith is the author of Looking Up: Poems, 2010–2020 (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press), Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005–2010 (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992–2004 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). He is also the author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Smith retired as co-editor of The Southern Review and Boyd Professor of English in 2002 at Louisiana State University. He then became the Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry and Chairman of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, from which he retired in 2013.