Along Orange Blossom Trail
Between billboards for Subway and a college of art and design, scaffolding
had become home to an osprey, a huge nest hidden behind two colorful ads,
the finest shapes of the dead, plenty of room to pick apart field mice, sure things
up with a few flexible bones. The kids will love it when they come—out of the wind,
spacious enough for the newborn birds of prey to feel fresh blood finding its way
to their untested wings—a perfect view of squirrels walking the phone lines, undetectable
as messages soaring through the wires. I wanted to call someone, tell them what I’ve learned
about bird-sky, explain how it’s all about the hunt, no fly-by for the Merlin Falcon,
no air show in the buzzard’s flight plan. Precision. Pinpoint dives. The scent when
it’s time to eat. I keep it all to myself, gull-like, unable to tell the difference between
the taste of trash and the aroma of a life just lived, the appetite of appetite teaching me
to share only what I drop, reminding me I’m not very good at what I do.
Between billboards for Subway and a college of art and design, scaffolding
had become home to an osprey, a huge nest hidden behind two colorful ads,
the finest shapes of the dead, plenty of room to pick apart field mice, sure things
up with a few flexible bones. The kids will love it when they come—out of the wind,
spacious enough for the newborn birds of prey to feel fresh blood finding its way
to their untested wings—a perfect view of squirrels walking the phone lines, undetectable
as messages soaring through the wires. I wanted to call someone, tell them what I’ve learned
about bird-sky, explain how it’s all about the hunt, no fly-by for the Merlin Falcon,
no air show in the buzzard’s flight plan. Precision. Pinpoint dives. The scent when
it’s time to eat. I keep it all to myself, gull-like, unable to tell the difference between
the taste of trash and the aroma of a life just lived, the appetite of appetite teaching me
to share only what I drop, reminding me I’m not very good at what I do.
|
Passage It was the perfect day to sit motionless in the cemetery with the dead, my favorite bench between Shorn and Bliss empty. There was just enough morning mist to give the graves a lively look, you could feel the wind taking a deep breath before deciding on a direction, sense the silence slowly washing the names away as if the stone were a sandy beach and I combing the edges, sifting for some evidence of myself. Almost perfect, I should say—the water waiting in sprinklers, timed and set to splash across blankets and grass, a nightlight living out its last few moments. Best suit and bones beneath my feet, I walk away one winter at a time, thoughts vanishing in the gears of a backhoe, the sounds they make and the sounds they don’t. |
Old Machinery Peghorn Station, 1926 Something looks like it hauled water once-- oak planks held together by iron bands, copper sill cocks gone green, tires flat. Rust makes sure the gears and gauges are steady, tightens a few things after a heavy rain. It all roamed orange groves and cane fields according to the old map at the trail head. Now, it’s my job to wonder about the last time it came back dry behind pickers, when the first irrigations lines were dug. The water appears from underground today, orchards away and timed, a miracle more dependable than clouds. I look for the face of a farmhand in the oak every time I come but haven’t found one—only spots of decay looking like seeds I imagine under the asphalt leading away, waiting for the sun to turn the key and a storm to gather some steam. |
George Bishop’s latest work appears in Pirene’s Fountain and Border Crossing. New work will be included in New Plains Review, Breakwater Review and Hawaii Pacific Review. Bishop is the author of four chapbooks, most recently the forthcoming Old Machinery from White Violet Press. He attended Rutgers University and now lives and writes in Kissimmee, Florida.