Toxostoma curvirostre

Curve-billed thrasher

Michael Rerick

 

 

Habitat Habitual

For Toxostoma curvirostre (curve-billed thrasher)

 

 

—Summer lens focus flashes taxonomy.

 

Took to the hook nervously fruit falls to a jet

feathered old man falcon fingered with a needle

yellow eye. Whose bill gets delayed in full cacti

deposits a nest egg and locked into shrubbery.

 

—Markings take to birder habits.

 

Liver speckled from a prickly hotel gray

and ant nosey for Gamble oak seed currency

droop eyes see long shots of another day

wet with insects taken on desert nights.

 

—Texts approximate elevation, not capture.

 

A head thresh spreads curled leaves and potluck

territory bakes everything neighborhood delicious

except bursts of six-foot flings leaving agape beaks.

A whit-whiter preens a tense territory in audio arcs.

 

—Arms and eyes wobble history.

 

Grimaces cooperate to mate a clutch in thorns

a change gently replacing the hard eating times

of unburied beetles. A twitch weaved thrasher

twig perch edges into logged jump evidence.

 

 

~~~~~

Michael Rerick is the author of In Ways Impossible to Fold (Marsh Hawk Press) and X-Ray (Flying Guillotine Press). Poems appear or are forthcoming in Coconut, Event, Greatcoat, Octopus Magazine, Psychic Meatloaf, and Slope. He lives and teaches in Tucson, AZ.