EMU: A LECTURE FOR VOICES; FOR STEREO – Chapbook

Emu

Hear poems in my mind. And sometimes the poems are accompanied by voices, sometimes more than one voice and sometimes the voices 'perform' the poem. In this sense I write for the page, but I also write for the stage.

So, with EMU: A LECTURE FOR VOICES: FOR STEREO, consulting a variety of sources, including reference volumes, I imagine a poem that might be spoken aloud by 2 or 3 of these sources in something of the voice in which the reference material is written. Pontifical / bemused authoritative scholarly voices riffing on the subject… in contrast to which, there is the central voice of the 'author…'

Yeah, I know, weird… but at least it's about something and it's based on fact. And, Jesus, I think of the hours I spent working on this thing!
Anyway, I have approx. 20 poems to audition for the chapbook. And then what? Then what?

EMU: A LECTURE FOR VOICES; FOR STEREO

Three-toed, one-headed, its wings the size
of chicken-feet—and largest (next to
the ostrich) of all existing birds…
the emu stands, colossal, ratite
six feet high
its god enplumaged, dark
hidden in the dismal, drooping, soft
brown hair.
Its hips, hump, its bulge, perhaps
of flightlessness, or sky—appear as speed;
the stunted cause, the befeathered, round
sloping, still embodiment of speed.

The emu runs, swoop-skims, a two-shanked
one-humped, egg-hatched camel: the bird most
like a camel.
Avoiding deserts
however, the emu inhabits
open fields and forests where, keeping
in small companies, it feeds on fruit
(of the emu tree), herbage and roots…
now and then booming, with subsequent,
and peculiarly hurried efforts,
at breeding.
Extinct, in Tasmania
on Kangaroo, King and Wing Islands,
the bird is found, and in small numbers,
in Southeastern Australia.

IT BREEDS
Its nest, as if it had been rolled in
and humped (in reverse), is a shallow
sandy, green-egg-filled pit, the eggs of which, all
nine (to thirteen), are incubated
by the cock, an earnest, familial
type of ostrich.

The young, at birth, bear thin
length-striped down, are wattleless, and walk;
cursed, crane-necked, blank, dull adult-eyed
baby, camel, ostrich-ducks…
in file
swift, point-beaked,
mothered, three-toed, one-headed
—an image, but for the stripes (and down),
of itself, in age.

Its booming note, god
and size, are at rest in it, in its
conspicuous state of egglessness.
It screams, booms, bounds

…BECOMES IMMENSE, FLIES
extinct, shaggy, stripe less (in age)

FLOATS
its head in the camel clouds, the hump
the bulge, the sandlessness that is God.

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