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Christina Hutchins
I Met a Silence
and in the silence a poem
I still needed the I
but the I was soaring away
a small lilt of unchecked
sorrow I tried to shortcut
down the slope between
two roads Steep untrod
except by mice by snakes
by beetles and ants there on
a small plateau of deer path
was a dead songbird gone
charcoal black its eye
a hole its beak open
its black wing half-folded
and going transparent
Shrunken toward earth
the eyeless thing both
decaying and preserved
was trammeled by the delicate
mesh of late summer
stems In the bird
hollowed out and flattened
was a silence and in that silence
the song-rapt days
kept alive by a heart
going to dust To release
what is human the making
takes up socket and ravished
wing and audibly beats
their irrevocable dispersal
To deny the poem would
kill the bird twice—
to kill the bird again
would kill the I who departs
as if from within—
Christina Hutchins teaches philosophy and poetry to graduate students at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She is the author of two chapbooks, Collecting Light, Acacia Books, 1999, and Radiantly We Inhabit the Air, Seven Kitchens Press, 2011, which won a Robin Becker Prize. Her literary awards include the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the National Poetry Review Finch Prize, a James D. Phelan Literary Award, and two Barbara Deming Poetry Awards. She lives in Albany, California, where she serves as the city's first poet laureate. "I Met a Silence" is from her new book, The Stranger Dissolves, to be published April 2, 2011.
Christina Hutchins will be reading from her new book in Northern California: April 1 at Mrs. Dalloway's Literary & Garden Arts, Berkeley; April 16 at Book Passage in Corte Madera; April 19 at Reader's Books, Sonoma; May 14 at Copperfield's Books, Petaluma; June 14 at Albany Library; and August 9 at The Barkin' Dog Grill, Modesto. See Calendar for details.