Sean Serrell

Two Poems

RORSCHACH ON POND

By the time I floated past the heron, the flies
had come and gone. What remained, suspended,
were the hard parts: split milky quills and bones
bleached to fracture, ridged and rigid trachea,

the scalpel keel. Nylon conniptions lashed
the bird to its inborn pose of vigilance
and hunger: still-hunting: its last vision
was possibly a fish: underneath, out of reach.

My first thoughts were marionette, mobile,
caltrop—if I’d tried to free it, the grained bill
and bones would have stabbed me and splintered:
resisted as if something in that stillness was
worth defending, now that the vigil was over.

KUDZU COVERS VACANT HOUSE,
BLOUNT COUNTY

But it is not vacant: two baby vultures loaf
beside the sagged and ruptured mattress.
Their grey down would look like a shroud
of batting if not for the hint beneath of black
skin. Long before autumn, the stubbed quills
will shed their grey and shingle the bodies blacker
to become planks of asphalt soaring

in sunlight. But for now, the only light they know
is the color of the algae coating the windows,
and the green blast beyond the front door swinging
by the tendons of its top hinge. Their mother lands
on the door’s crooked jut, then drops to the rotten
welcome mat which once read Season’s Greetings.
The two young rise, hissing and flailing, to meet

their mother’s gallop and her warm craw salted
with the blood she’s gathered. They live off leavings.
When winter comes, they will have flown
their heavy bodies off and left this house veined
by their dirt. And by the roping kudzu, which even
after its sweeping tumble of creation leaves
the brittlest claim to earth or sky.