Two Poems by Jennifer Clarvoe

Not Seeing the Hoopoe

The hoopoe is not in the mirror
nor in the mulberry tree
Please stop calling out “hoopoe”
to each strange bird you see

That is the natty Eurasian jay
that is a pert wheatear
that the White-backed woodpecker
The hoopoe is not here

It is not in the sob of the dove at dawn
nor the bells, early and late,
of the goats that roam uphill and down,
but in notes like a distant flute

easy for ear to follow
like a child’s unthinking tune
Oh don’t try to pin it down
it’s gone

Yes, it nested by the gate
yes, it fed its young
yes, you have heard its cry
but the hoopoe, the hoopoe is flown

Dead Rat

on its back, one paw
raised as if to speak, oh oh
but never to speak

to be taken mid-
thought: image of a full life
not an unfinished

don’t photograph that
I tell myself but my mind
snaps it anyway

brilliant little green
flies noting, annotating
the author’s corpus

Jennifer Clarvoe's Invisible Tender (Fordham University Press, 2000) was awarded the Poets Out Loud Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  A Rome Prize in Literature afforded her time to complete her second book, Counter-Amores (University of Chicago Press, 2011).  She recently retired after teaching nearly thirty years at Kenyon College.  She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.