Shawn Fisher
The Starling

Poor little refugee,
wedged on the ledge of my office window
this darkened afternoon —
a starling, the drenchèd darling of pastorals,
trembling not from the rain
but from the burden of a name with aspirations.

You're a victim of poetic diction, my weary malaprop,
a wishful-thinking fiction who wings with ease
through lines of lyric sylvanry,
however clumsily you plod along in life.
We adore the gloried soaring word of you,
but not this mudling stormed
upon a sodden sill —
no star alight, aloft through night,
but a groundling compounding my fear
that sound is more charming in poesy than truth.

For in truth, a lump of tar is all you are
and all you would be called if we recalled your spirant,
took that tyrant from your back which makes of you
a verbal sleight of hand,
another grand illusion set in verse.
Your lofty name's your curse: what poetry anoints
so often disappoints outside of stanzas.
I look at you, a daub of humus brown,
and all my muses topple down.
But it isn't you I blame.

Could we release you from your shame
by granting you a more befitting name?
Must we devise with airy words
a beauty we don't find in leaden birds?

But here you end your rest by puffing out your chest,
as though to show you've had enough of earthly assignations.
Your feathers tipped with drips of rain, you shake
and spray into the air before your flight
a universe of iridescent light so bright I need to look away.

O thou Keatsian starry Fay...

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