Dante Di Stefano
Birdwatchers of America
after Anthony Hecht
In our part of the country, a false dusk
lingers for hours and even the full moon,
if it rises, resembles too closely
a spent shotgun shell flattened on train tracks.
If you look through binoculars, you're apt
to see bare limbs and nooses smoldering
in the breeze. Somewhere in your heart (of hearts)
a chirp ghosts after a lost harmony.
All lost harmonies are lies, though, all hues
hide bruises, all wings are tinged with sunset.
Up close, who's to say that an albatross
is not an eagle? Flight is not falling?
We find ourselves winging through one nation
under scattershot and tulipped barrel,
our constitution quilled in car bomb red,
our treaties redacted in peacock blue.
Look at the stars on our flag: ostrich egg white,
the color of toe tags, receipts, warrants,
citations, deeds, mortgages, bills of sale,
the skyline lassoing ink on a page.
The Paris Agreement
It's Saturday afternoon in the universe and I am wondering what's on Netflix while the planet is dying and I am reimagining a world of microorganisms sustained and thriving on the mummified lips of the corpse of Kerouac—or is it Frank O'Hara—no, it's just some sad former postal employee who voted the Republican ticket every election and went to confession once a week for thirty years and succumbed to pancreatic cancer three years after retirement, but who had become a vegetarian for health reasons in the early twenty first century and practiced yoga and yet could never shed the north side working class from his repertoire of ways of being or almost Vietnam for that matter and who was my father in the last tweaked vision of the Anthropocene.
In America, an author in The Atlantic says, “we have figured out how to launder our money through our higher virtues,” and that is why we read The Atlantic and why we heat our homes with clean coal lit by the crumpled envelopes of junk mail offering to reduce school loans and why the sculpted bodies of Instagram celebrities spin through the undersides of our closed eyelids—even those of us unfamiliar with Instagram—and why we on the bottom still write poetry and die poor and hide behind the landlady's accordion blinds in apartment living rooms across the nation.
Meanwhile, what about police brutality and homophobia and ableism and confederate monuments and rapists in the White House and serial abusers of women under almost every roof and white supremacists in the White House and con men in the White House and criminals in the White House and we should all be rioting in the streets every day and the baby is crying upstairs so I can't be more specific, but…
Someday soon I'm going to walk away from the fresh cut lawns of the suburbs, find myself a timbered antiphon, the vesper in a single leaf, hold it out for my wife, my daughter, this doomed earth cradling our golden now.
About Dante Di Stefano
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. Along with Maria Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).