A woodpecker’s

                               working the valley

or is it the other way round?

That bone-clinking clatter, maracas

or knucklebones or dance of  gravel

on a drumskin, the string of  the air

twanged on the hollow body of  itself ...

It’s the tree that gives voice,

the fifty-foot windpipe, and the bird

is its voice box, the shuddering

membrane that troubles the space

inside, which otherwise would be

all whispers, scratch-and-scrabblings,

the low dry flute-mouth of wind

at its  just-right or just-wrong angle,

the cough-clearing of moss

or newly ripened rot falling in.

But the woodpecker picks the whole

wood up and shakes it, plays it

as his gamelan, with every sounding

pinged from every branch his instrument.

Or rather, it’s the one dead trunk,

the tree, that sings its dying, and this

is the quick of  it; red-black-white, the bird

in uniform, alert, upstanding to attention

is its attention, our attention, how the forest,

in this moment, looks up, knows itself.