Poem-A-Day #184 : Finches (after Eduardo C. Corral)

I often see the odd beauty in the brutal. I read Eduardo C. Corral's poem To a Straight Man this morning and it caught me completely. I was especially caught by this movement:

               the buttons
                         on your jacket
     are finches
               I wanted to yell
                         as you vanished

These finches blended with those that Charles Darwin collected. Some of these finches were stolen in 2009 and were feared to be used to make high-end fishing lures.


Finches (after Eduardo C. Corral)

Read the poem about the beating again
then again

Do you hear the sound of the finches in it?
          the are popping from branch to branch
               they do not hover like a falcon
          they do not create wake
     behind them in the air of this space

Then again
the beating poem

In the room in the basement of the museum
the case full of Darwin's finches is emptied

Use the displaced beak of the finch
                    as a needle to patch the hole in your jeans
the golden green of light filtering through late summer leaves
          is thread enough
     possibly

Feathers make lures for fly fishing
the glitter on the ends of these hooks is light
in puddles
on cobblestones

Finches collected during the second voyage of the HMS Beagle
Natural History Museum, London