Slow Spring on Vancouver Island

In the understory, sotto voce,
crypto-birds rehearse. Is
that you, Junco
setting your Hopkins-self aside
to sip-sip-sip so
generically? That you, Varied thrush, 
clearing your throat ad
nauseam, uncertain
as the rain which quits, dithers, 
threatens, finally 
compromises on the drizzle into which
your indecipherable ciphers fit like inter-
office memoranda?
                            Over the dun
duff of the forest floor one alder leaf — 
thinned by winter to its skeleton — 
hangs like a glyph.
Foliose lichens urge their hypergreens.
One day soon — 
so goes the tale — Junco's voice
will quicken into trill, its quick lusts
gargling. Varied thrush will thrust its whistle-hum
frankly into the mix, and that last leaf —
like an icon suddenly
relaxing to cliché —
uncling. And then — by 
the Jesus we'll be on our way.


Crinoid

A fossil, preposterous
and common, light
as a dime, as infinity's
poker chip, a small grey
Tylenol-sized disk you can
slip into your pocket
or cup in your palm.
Turn it on end, 
you can see where a delicate fishline
ran down its core. Reel it in,
you'll haul up Ordovician oceans
where they boogied and grew, vertebrae
with frond-like arms and bloom-like heads
asway in the tide that fed them, as the mind
of Wang Wei in the ever-adjusting
wind.
         O Chordates, you'll exclaim
to our distinguished many-membered phylum,
spare a moment to applaud
this alien far off flowering spine.
                                               O Elvis,
wherever you are,
shake it with the snakes that first
shook it.