The Milk of Birds

by Gary Michael Dault

The 100 poems making up The Milk of Birds (the title comes from a chocolate candy the author's partner loved when she was a girl in Poland) began as a deliberate homage to Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese (1971). Soon into his progress, however, the author felt the writing beginning to pull away from the Rexroth model, becoming, instead, a series of short, sometimes plangent, sometimes meditative, sometimes exuberant takes on the beauty and travail of domestic life, on the separateness that is the enemy to love, on the witnessing of the night and the cold that lies at the heart of age and one's overview of all that life has meant.

100 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

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[mwpm]

Note from the Author: Before coming to The Milk of Birds as its title, I had intended to call this work something like One Hundred Poems from Kenneth Rexroth, since I was generating them, as rapidly and as pre-consciously as possible, from Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (New York: New Directions, 1971).

The rainwater runs into my cup
all night long
and yet in the morning
there is nothing there to drink

- pg. 8

* * *

If I watch the swans
I fall asleep
f the swans watch me
they drown

- pg. 12

* * *

I stop what I'm doing
how lonely it feels
that the river keeps flowing

- pg. 21

* * *

Wakeful while the long night goes
silting like stars into the sieve of dawn
I get up to walk by the river
and find it gone

- pg. 43

* * *

I walked in the meadow
until the weeds
growing higher as I went
made me an insect

- pg. 57

* * *

The endless evening
sieved through my window screens
ends up as cubes of twilight
on the study floor

- pg. 61

* * *

A woman filing her nails
until she grows
so small
she disappears
altogether

- pg. 71

* * *

I'd get out of history
if I could
I'd lift it over my head
like a T-shirt

What I'd like
is to be a trunk of flame

- pg. 100