Hummers

Hummers tell me all I'll know

of peril joys of vertigo.

Two hours after we fill the new feeder

with sugar and water,

and hang it high on our balcony

over the woodside,

in dashes the pioneer emerald, frontier sapphire.

The needle beak pierces the red rubber nipple, gulps.

Soon others come:  ruby dancers,

dusty flicks, their sheen more visible, weirdly,

from 8 yards distance

where they light in the madrona.

I didn't know, at that first sweet meal,

how that delicate sipping mouth

could skewer the rival,

tiny as a bead.

That purring of wings, the attentive hovering,

makes a poise for a plunge,

a shrieking descent,

a downward spearflight

toward the heart of an enemy

or of a flower, below in the foliage.

Savage efficiency looks like intelligence;

ferocity has a brilliance.

Those tiny breasts fill with violence.

Such blazing energy, so neatly formed,

manifests a craze to survive:

necessary voracity sustains the jeweled mechanism.

But in tonight's long summer twilight

I observe the bird's unimagined quiet,

an actual perch.

I watch where this one flies from the glass flower:

there against the primitive madrona wood the bird,

greener than anything and still as a sparrow (or my idea of one),

stays long enough for me to memorize the tree,

the bird's location in it.

And I have gotten up to get this notepad

and a beer,

slamming the screen, and making

a great bustle of rhyme;

and still poses the bird,

the size and shape of a leaf,

quiet and green.

                                                                    1991