The Poet Winged

By Al Felix

Unleash the mountains from their kennels,

flowers from their eyries, let them fly

to unmapped places, across uncharted seas;

let loose the variegated clouds, cirrus,

stratus, cumulonimbus, give them poles

to fish with in the sky’s bottomless waters,

catch errant, inattentive stars; give paints

and brushes to trees, crayons to crows

so that they can write graffiti on the far

side of the moon, and when night,

inebriate of air, comes stumbling home

clothed only in that air, cover his nakedness

with shadows discarded by yesterday’s sun.

Then it will be possible, if just barely so,

to gather together the songs of mountains,

flowers, trees and crows, night and all its

companions unnamed here, and with

a blindingly lucent skein of perhapses,

stitch all of the above into a shadowed

cloak and make a maybe that might

become a winged thing, capable of

flight to Somewhere’s Nowhere and

back, having discovered itself to be

a mythical bird called Poem.

AL FELIX will join UB English professor emeritus Howard Wolf in this month’s Earth’s Daughters Gray Hair Series reading at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Hallwalls Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave. (near Tupper Street) in Buffalo. A former English teacher at Orchard Park High School, his writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications. He is the author of “Jackie Felix Remembered: Wife, Artist, Feminist,” a chapbook of poems and photographs about his wife, the prominent Buffalo painter and printmaker Jackie Felix, who died last April.