I cannot name the one with the scimitar beak and the mohawk
………….who spends all day drilling holes in tree trunks.
I cannot name the enormous one with the white stocking cap
………….on his head, hounded by glory and flags, poor devil.
I cannot name the thumblet with wings that whirr
………….like the new kind of dentist’s drill —Rupert or Rufus
………….come to mind when I watch her at the scarlet feeder
………….but I cannot be sure: the flash of her arrival
………….too swift for color, is what matters in the long run.
I cannot name the one who hoots
………….the one who dives from treetops
………….the one who stands on chopstick legs
………….waiting for sushi.
I cannot even name the caged one who calls himself “pretty”
………….and mocks the world with his nasal chant
………….nor the big white one on the beach who stabs
………….the rotten flesh of his dead brother.
………….Then there are those with the red vests or speckled chests:
I cannot name them either (or perhaps I simply will not).
………….Unnamed brownish ones doze on telephone poles
………….hunched and grumpy as old men
………….while the black-jacketed strut in the road
………….rolling like sailors and holding up traffic.
I cannot name the tiny chirper who follows me along the creek
………….moving so fast that I see nothing of bird, nothing
………….of shape or weight or color or sex, nothing
………….to look up in a book if I had a book or wanted a book.
I cannot even hazard a guess:
………….She might be the spirit of my dead horse.
………….She might be nobody.

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Photo by Minette Layne.

Judith Barrington’s fifth collection of poetry, Long Love: New & Selected Poems was launched in June 2018.  She is also the author of The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award. In 2001 Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Judith is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program. She has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain and is one of the founders of Soapstone Inc. Barrington was born in Brighton, England in 1944 and moved to the United States in 1976. Although she has made her home in Portland, Oregon since then, she spends time each year in Europe doing readings and workshops. 

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Minette Layne is a photographer, nature lover, longtime marine naturalist, and tech writer who lives in Seattle.