Two Poems

Watching the Birdwatcher

She peers through a pair of binoculars
into a treetop lit with the day's last embers,
where some bird alights unseen by me.
Her gaze poised so tremulous and light,
as if resting upon a twig looking, looking
at the bird that we don't see. The bird in the tree,
and the seer of the bird sharing for the stainless present
the same slender branch. She stands stock-still.
Expecting nothing. Neither bird, nor bird watcher, nor air
are moving. Nor I, as I watch her, as she watches the bird
all hung weightless and timeless and spaceless. Perched
upon this dimensionless brink. The twig could not bear
any more load than this bare awareness. If, therefore,
you would not spook the bird, nor snap the twig,
nor shatter this spun glass globe of air, then alight upon
the world like air, like breath. And do not linger any longer
than this bird watcher who now strolls off, the bird still hidden,
still lost in shadow. Forgetting the bird, forgetting herself.
Dissolving like an apparition into twilight's bright harbor.
Only this poem still holding on. Foolish poem
grasping at the ungraspable world.

Sunglasses

Strange how much I fancied wearing them
like a movie-star contemptuous of his fans,
dark glasses holding the world at bay
on my flight out of Cincinnati,
where I had picked them up, killing time
at an airport newsstand, for $12.99, plus tax,
thinking of the fierce New Mexico sun.
How like a monk I felt within the slate-gray cloister
of my sunglasses, or a snail sidling
into its lacquered shell
leaving the glaring world outside.
Within that dim tent I could be anyone at all:
the generalisimo of the banana republic of myself,
or a dashing Che plotting the generalisimo's downfall.
Ensconced behind shades, nobody could track
my insurgent imagination, nobody
could surveil my agonies or my ecstasies
on Delta flight 983 to Albuquerque.
Which, for a poet with lean and haunted eyes,
was a blessing in disguise,
like being a secret agent, a certifiable nobody,
nameless, stateless, a closed book
passing incognito from one world to another.
As poets do routinely,
whose calling is to remain
deliberately unreadable, their feral selves hidden
behind figures of speech, concealed in allusion,
veiled in metaphorical fogbanks, lurking catlike in delphian
riddles. And then, suddenly
like mild-mannered Clark Kent
ripping off their lyric glasses, and leaping
into the New Mexico sun.

Richard Schiffman is a writer based in New York City. He has published two nonfiction books, and has just completed a third on Jewish mysticism. He has also worked as a freelance journalist and commentator for Morning Edition and All Things Considered on National Public Radio. He has recently started sending out his poetry. His poems are currently slated to appear in the Atlanta Review, New York Quarterly and The Pedestal.

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