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Sparrow Trapped in the Airport

By Averill Curdy Averill Curdy

Never the bark and abalone mask

cracked by storms of a mastering god,

never the gods’ favored glamour, never

the pelagic messenger bearing orchards

in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom

or valor or cunning, much less hunger

demanding vigilance, industry, invention,

or the instinct to claim some small rise

above the plain and from there to assert

the song of another day ending;

lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked

in the clamorous public of the flock

so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals,

faces shining with oils of their many miles,

where it hops and scratches below

the baggage carousel and lights too high,

too bright for any real illumination,

looking more like a fumbled punch line

than a stowaway whose revelation

recalls how lightly we once traveled.

Source: Poetry (November 2005).

Biography

A lyric poet influenced by Donne, Hopkins, Merrill, and Auden, Averill Curdy notes, “In my own work, the aural quality and weight of words is very important and I think it’s partly an attempt to make them feel as material as the smears of color on a painter’s palette.” Her meditative, dense lines are smoothed by time; as Curdy explains, “I write slowly—always, it seems, at the very limit of what I know.”

Curdy began to write . . .

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