Page 28 - Vol. VII #1

Poem for My Country
Above the town waterfront two eagles tangled, turning together in blue winter sky, by their bright bare talons
clasped. Losing lift, four dark wings flapped a wreath of chaos. Too soon for that springtime aerial courtship,
also a cartwheel plummet, these, both, must’ve been male, and this their battle for what we groundlings call territory,
though no word can hold all the air
to the heights, the shore woods and up creek valleys into the evergreened slopes,
from the beach shallows out to the channel where herring and blackmouth flash, where the black-and-white orcas breach.
The birds tumbled a good arc of sky clawed onto each other, and might
in a second have crashed on the tarpaper
roof of the old Doghouse
Tavern, where the kids and I sat over our chowders and Cokes years
before they shuttered the place.
We’d watch, through the wide back window, how the gulls cracked clamshells open
dropping them from aloft to the rocks. Oh the eagles released each other, leveled their spans and pulsed apart,
one north one south. I thought, the sense of consequence—behind their mute beaks, inside those shadow-feathered breasts,
the vying raptors knew to unclench.
Myers is the author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels (Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award) and Love’s Test (winner, Grayson Books Chapbook Contest). Other awards include The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize and The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize. His work has recently appeared in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. He is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.
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