Brad Vogel
Leveling w You
Plumb Beach, November 2024
Red shouldered hawk or harrier
I’m glad we couldn’t decide
How we leaned into it
And a little bit into each other
Best guesses and bird shapes
Saltgrass golden bluebacked
November late morning I
Like how much you like
Northern bayberry gin spirit
Ghosting from our hands
How birds are not just birds
But oystercatchers and brant
Not just birds but joys
Needed, really, now so much
Like impossibly numerous
Mudsnails evading raptor shade
Stretching off in quietest defiance
Left the muck and making a go
Making the visible landscape
Like plasticky pickleweed patches
Here when the tide feels
Uncannily, unprecedentedly
Low
But what treasures unveil
In the wake of calamity
Spider crab carapace
Seldom seen sandworms
And your hands on binoculars
As bird of prey bursts by
Overhead, orange bittersweet
Burns us at closest possible range
Harsh afternoon emblazons it duneside
Some oblivion rides in the wings
And we try to find beauty
In our ageless
Unfolding
Fear
Brad Vogel is the author of the poetry collections Find Me In the Feral Pockets (Euphrosine Publishing, 2024) and Broad Meadow Bird (Euphrosine Publishing, 2015). His poems have appeared in Evergreen Review, Smartish Pace, Freshwater Review, No Dear, The Eel Pit, Alla Prima, and other journals. Founder and coordinator of NYC Poets Afloat, Vogel lives and canoes in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
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a stunning adventure in the realms between sky and earth, thank you
I like how this moves from brief flashes of nature observations to an undercurrent of anxiety that unfolds into outright fear for the two people in the poem. It is worth noting how the fear that we live with now never goes away entirely, even in a sanctuary for wildlife.