-new nature, lone shooter-

this morning it’s the birds again,—

cawing, peeping, chirping and screaming

bloody murder, buried in the summer density
of surrounding trees.

late last night, the original 1933
production of King Kong
was broadcast on television
and was once again captivated by the scene
where we view the lush, dreamlike,
prehistoric landscape
and follow it into the greying density
as our heroes wander deeply into it
from the foreground

just as the spike-tailed Stegosaurus
shows up and rotates comically
before it drops when shot dead
during its attack.

but it’s the birds,— the dark creatures
crossing the distant sky that intrigue,—

the stop-action animation of their flight
adding a strange validity to an otherworldly
sense of being in a place where we know
intellectually that we don't belong.

a more sinister scene with the same
sky-crossing birds
at the extravagant Xanadu picnic
in the 1941 movie Citizen Kane

accomplishes its parallel link to the near-
tactile experience.

so I consider the birds this early morning
in the light of their ancestral movie-time portrayals

in an effort to be a little less annoyed
with the intrusion.

just the same,
I fondly recall my old Uncle Pete

who’d snare the common bird of the yard
through landscape trickery and after
a quick kill, pluck 'em and rinse them off
beneath the faucet of the kitchen-sink
before tossing them into the pot of simmering
tomato sauce giving it a kick.