Stockholm Rock: A Semi-Oral History
I played a guitar
shaped like a rutabaga
in a band called The Snaggerz.
I sang like a turnip.
They loved us in Sweden
though it was hard to tell.
The Swedes threw artfully designed
pillows at us. We fell asleep.
Records were recorded.
The band broke up
when Sweden turned against
its root vegetables.
I played a rutabaga
just so I could say the word
rutabaga. The dance craze
was premature.
First Hummingbird
Hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death, and are able to store just enough energy to survive overnight.
I was a grown man before I saw my first,
the mad flush and flurry and disappear
of it. The startle of it. The did you see
of it. We were alone and not alone
in the dried red flower of August heat
of our mad affair in the hills
we called mountains, in the woods
we called forest, in the fields
we called meadows.
In Detroit I had seen:
Sparrow. Robin. Crow.
Lost gulls in the black sea
of the A&P parking lot.
Cardinals were remarked upon
as miracle. Maybe a blue jay.
All brown birds were sparrows.
Pigeons. I saw pigeons.
Alone, I saw it. She who had seen many
did not. She who knew the names of birds
and flowers and trees and addictive drugs.
In the woods of West Virginia.
In the rental cabin that took only cash.
I am not a watcher of birds
but I felt a hummingbird tremor—
sudden lust, mad beating, mad.
A bird. Like that. Nectar.
Her husband, concerned.
Reception, spotty. She left
her sweater behind. Fled.
The tiniest birds. The only ones
that fly backward.
like that.
Jim Daniels’ new book of poems, Birth Marks, was published by BOA Editions in 2013. His next book of short fiction, Eight Mile High, will be published by Michigan State University Press in 2014. A native of Detroit, Daniels teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.