When Sanders brings feed to his chickens, some sparrows
Sitting and rocking in the peach tree at the fence corner
By the chicken house, fly up
And shoot off to another tree farther away,
An acacia. The whole air
Is shaken by their mass motion.
But then one leaf of the empty peach tree stirs
And I see in it one sparrow sitting still.
Is he a guard? absent-minded? averse
To mass motion? Rather, he may enjoy
The comings and goings
Of Sanders to the chickens.
When I was eight, I put in the left-hand drawer
Of my new bureau a prune pit.
My plan was that darkness and silence
Would grow it into a young tree full of blossoms.
Quietly and unexpectedly I opened the drawer a crack
And looked for the sprouts; always the pit
Anticipated my glance, and withheld
The signs I looked for.
After a long time, a week, I felt sorry
For the lone pit, self-withheld,
So saved more, and lined them up like an orchard.
A small potential orchard of free flowers.
Here memory and storage lingered
Under my fingerprints past retrieval,
Musty and impatient as a prairie
Without its bee.
Some friends think of this recollection
As autobiography. Others think it
A plausible parable of computer analysis.
O small and flowering orchard of free friends!
Josephine Miles, Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1998.