Tuesday Poem: All Things End in Fragrance

I couldn’t resist another poem this week about Starlings, as an interesting contrast. This poem is the final one in the beautiful collection Miscreants (Norton 2007), by the American poet James Hoch. I admire the careful attention to nature, which before we know it has moved to metaphor and by way of metaphor to the elegaic. I admire the way the poem reaches out to include us in its scope. Most of all, I admire the careful syntax that permits for the final line to refer simultaneously to the poem itself and to the reader, all the while referring back via metaphor to the birds:

All Things End in Fragrance

Out the window, starlings
             fidget in the wasted eaves

of a bar burned down last summer.
They pilfer, figure,
                                              engineer

charred wire, booth cushion,
                anything light enough

to haul by beak, wedge high
               between blackened 2 X 4.

A nest,
               a bed for the dying
or just born—
                            The birds shuttle,

their feathers taking on
               what they inhabit,

the way, Dear Witness, the silk
                in your shirts took asafetida,

mustard oil burning
                in a skillet, as this letter

makeshift and late
                                             receives
the leaden face of broken type,

a shape which, for now, says
Stay. Live here awhile

before rising into some other sorrow.