for Ana
Through the open car window
seven needles in a haystack
BoPEEP-doodle-our-PEOple!
snatched by ear out of the moving
prairie, like you
already fading, passed, gone.
BoPEEP-doodle-our-PEOple!
If I could find it, it would be
points of sunlight glancing
off a brooch so near shades
of gold in these moving
grasses I could scarcely distinguish
it from the grasses. Like you
it is always gone.
BoPEEP-doodle-our-PEOple!
The bird pulled it off like a string
of catches on this flying
trapeze which keeps swinging
back. If birds’ songs simply mean
I’m here! I’m here!
then why a song so baroque?
How many notes did it have?
Which notes were extra?
In the Beatles’ “Blackbird”
you again hear a meadowlark, its song
canned as the slow-motion replay
of a pass-reception on TV:
Love studied into pornography,
Bo-PEEP-diddk-diddk-her-PEEP-hole!
The bird falls off a see-saw,
hesitates, picks itself
back up on the rising board,
completes its song.
It does it again.
I prefer the song that eludes me,
this one which we are passing,
banjo music picked out
(continued, no stanza break)
through wind and distance
already falling behind
gone and not gone.
— Jonathan Holden
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 