Poetry Porch 2: Poetry

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Three sonnets by K. E. Duffin

1. Migration
2. Prediction
3. Thaw

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Migration
by K.E. Duffin

Clipped fluttering of all the region’s nighthawks
against blue vellum, their tiny scissor mouths—
as the city empties itself before the dark—
a cauldron of pixels, hugely headed south.

Animate crosshatchings of fibrillating quickness,
straightedge tails from a bin of school supplies,
nervous tapering wingtips, whose white slashes—
insignia of departure—salute the skies,

as a sulky bombast plane compares itself
with bantamweight flurries starlike stories above.
Soon they’ll stir a lightheaded (after the Gulf)
Mexican air over deep cenotes in droves,

like accent marks, cedillas, happily free
of their page. Most will make it through alive.
But along some nameless ridge, occasionally
one—a filing, a dead spark—will suddenly dive.

(Copyright © 1996 by K. E. Duffin.)

Prediction
by K. E. Duffin

Slung below Arcturus like a swung
and suddenly stilled plumb, a myope’s blur,
an eraser smudge on midnight-dipped vellum,
is that gossamer laggard of the calendar

called comet. Slow thrill for animists
who derive, from sky’s vast playground
a sudden airless hope for some melodious
docking of the real and the imagined,

odd as sudden hives or a comb jelly
with lucent parachute. When it arrives,
(is it there or not?) a breath of chalk,

a bobble in the numbers, it survives
only to grow and brighten silently
like any grand passion in the absence of talk.

(Copyright © 1996 by K. E. Duffin.)

Thaw
by K.E. Duffin

Winter sloth. Its wildly weaving shallows
in the near distance, light polished to the gleam
of silver and pressed, aghast, at all the windows
while yapping crows circle the house like a tomb.
Weather’s hauled in—like Southern England—
where palm trees...but no, the cracked bread
of the coast grows sodden in sudden warm rain,
snow’s depressed cousin. December’s dead.
Till geology mortifies the scene again
as buoyant rafts of neat, inscrutable birds
undulate toward Europe, the sky grows plain,
less near, and the point of crisp words,
distinct colors, boundaries—the gin of stop—
pours in with the cold surf kicking up.

(Copyright © 1996 by K. E. Duffin.)

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Tracks--Photograph by John Goldie

To read more poems by K. E. Duffin.
To read about K. E. Duffin.

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