POEM

Carolina Wren
(For Cindy Hogan)

by Wallace Kaufman

Poem

Posted April 13, 2001 · Issue 100




Where this time?
The pair makes several tries -
my hard hat, a can of nails, window ledge,
all filled with leaves.
How do they judge
those inferior, this one prime?
It's predetermined,
I don't know how.
So too their songs -
he two-notes or three-notes,
and she chirrrs along.
Same songs, same positions,
morning in and morning out
I wake to their repetition.
If they watch me, no doubt
they'd see my own routines,
but neither they nor I can find
what isn't wired in my genes.
Why does this human mind
hear "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro"
in his operatic voice?
Or is it "video, video, video"?
It's his song, but my choice.


Wallace Kaufman is a former science writing fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole and author of the new memoir Coming Out of the Woods: The Solitary Life of a Maverick Naturalist.
Cary Barnhard grew up in New Jersey, where his senior class voted him "most unique." He maintains that honor is a polite way of being voted "most likely to need therapy." After a few misadventures in the music industry, he started pretending to be a graphic artist. Eventually it became the truth.


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Previous Poems

Sunflower
by Allen C. Fischer (Posted March 30, 2001 · Issue 98)
Jonah Remembers the Whale
by Ivy Warwick (Posted March 2, 2001 · Issue 97)
The World Below the Brine
by Walt Whitman (Posted February 16, 2001 · Issue 96)
Pilling the Man
by Lynn Kozlowski (Posted February 2, 2001 · Issue 95)
Late Autumn Night in Iowa
by Mitul Sarkar (Posted January 19, 2001 · Issue 94)
Winter Uplands
by Archibald Lampman (Posted December 22, 2000 · Issue 93)

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