A Bird in the House

the truth flies hungry, at least and otherous,

of which—though it may be one—Kafka said troublingly,

it has many faces

it’s

the faces one wants, tripping the light shadows of its

skin colours of its wordy swiftness, angry and solvent,

of its loud remarks

as of feeding flocks one

year, one, among the smallest birds in the Northwest, flew

into the house a darting, panic thought at the walls

and grasses perched on the top right corner of the frame

of Tom Field’s painting wherein adulterous Genji is found

out—so Lady Murasaki reads from her blue scroll—and

permitted me to take it in my hand soft, intricate

mind honouring and lift it out into the air

and the next year, again, one flew into the house,

almost certain, like a visitor, gold-crowned winged

floating about odd discoveries and alighted on the brim

of the lasagna dish my hand trembled as I took it up

and moved slowly to lift it out of the window into

the air a kind of thinking like everybody else

looking for a continuing contravention of limits and

of substance

for Sharon Thesen

Copyright Credit: Robin Blaser, "A Bird in the House" from The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser. Copyright © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.

Source: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (University of California Press, 2006)

Truth Flies: A discussion of Robin Blaser’s “A Bird in the House.”