Home > Poetry Magazine > Birdsong

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Birdsong

By Joanie Mackowski b. 1963 Joanie Mackowski

Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat

rising from the new minted earth, granite

and basalt, proto-continents shuffling

and stacking the deck, first shadows flung

from the ultraviolet haze. A fern

uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace

of replication warms the world, one

becoming two, two four: exponential blossom.

Lush with collision, the teacup balance

of x and y, cells like balloons

escaping into the sky—then the dumbstruck

hour, unmoored by a river,

a first fish creeps to the land to marvel

at the monstrous buds of its toes. And stars

grow feet and walk across the years, into these dozing,

ordinary days, climbing the spine’s winding

stair, where crickets yawn and history spins.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

Biography

Joanie Mackowski’s collections of poems are The Zoo (2002) and View from a Temporary Window (2010). She received a BA from Wesleyan University, was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and received a PhD from the University of Missouri. A professor at Cornell University, she has worked as a French translator, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a juggler. She is the winner of the 2003 Kate Tufts . . .

Continue reading this biography