Yorick

Out on the frost of dawn after the storm

has cleared the tableaux, a pair of grey

shrike-thrushes skitter about nearby

and do their winter call which can’t

be crammed into a bardic resonance.

Listen closely and they sing outside

their range. Listen closely and they say

much more in knowing their own vocabulary,

their own conjugations and declensions.

The invasiveness of observation to make

an avian artefact we can transport

to a birdless zone, a room with adequate

acoustics and a crowd to goad us on.

Or the scholar ticking off species

and their characteristics in the book

of prosodic effects, salient subject matter.

I prefer—in all my culpability—to let

them be, and swerve as they take aim

for insects stirred up by this signing-off

on a winner’s potential, though one can’t be

sure for all the modelling. And summer

will change tunes in ways unknown, and patterns

of behaviour will slip away. Science worn out

just keeping up. Grey shrike-thrushes sing chaos

to its knees, snap anatomies in sharp bills. There’s

nothing certain about where next meals come from

and the nesting drive is never far away, and I am

in the way or changing the nature of the wood stack,

stirring up insects in the early morning awakenings

that can make all the difference.