Clade Song 4

Elegy for the Towhee

Tell me if it is too close for you
            the jackhammer beneath
                        your backbone
the steel ball tinning
                        your ear drum.

You could have hopped
            from downtown to Uptown
from stoplight glow and windshield glare
            to blue oak shade.

You could have flown
from traffic to canopy thrush
to the giving swing of a cracked branch
            that nods under singing.

You could have climbed
            to the chirrup            ta-wee
to the nest that kept an unformed fiddle.
            It was there
            you could have found me.

Kristi Moos is a writer and editor originally from the Central Valley of California. She is editor-in-chief of Poecology and directs the Literary Locator, a map of place-based literature. Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Orion, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Crab Orchard Review, New American Writing, Flyway, Terrain.org, Fourteen Hills, Deep Oakland, and others. Winner of the Harold Taylor Prize from the Academy of American Poets and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Kristi is currently writing a collection of narrative eco-poems set in the Central Valley. She lives in Palo Alto, California.