Maria Damon

Songs in the Key of Compost

Composting / weaving / photography

H.E. Fisher

Two Poems

Drive-thru Teller

A bird, a good twelve inches from his rainboot-yellow claws to his brown-speckled cap, sits on a low fence behind the bank near the drive-thru teller in the center of town where I am parked in line to make a deposit. The dashboard tells me it’s forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit on December 3rd. When I moved to the Hudson River Valley twenty years ago there were woods everywhere. Until today, I’ve never seen a bird this size in town. I take his portrait on my phone, post the photo on my social media page—Look at this beauty!—and get eighty-seven “likes.” My cousin, an avid birder, posts, I think it’s a Cooper’s Hawk. My “friends” on the timeline debate, share photos with links to aviary classifications and orders. I only know the names of certain birds—robins, canaries, and toucans, learned from watching animations. I want to learn their names but I’m afraid that by the time I do, they will no longer be here. Don’t teachers say something like that about their students? By the time I learn their names, they’ll be gone. Though the hawk is not my student, and I may think I am adding money to my account, but in fact, this is a withdrawal. On the other side of the fence is a gas station. My next stop.

Absolute Magnitude

I once wore solar eye shields

and waited for an eclipse.

In class we talk about the end of the world.

Kathy argues, Earth will remain.

It’s good to know something

is heaving in the atmosphere.

I have considered staring into the sun

to burn through light minutes,

view the story in reverse.