Furnishing Heaven   

For you it meant a library
where you'd read every book
in its own language and understand,
you said, and left the room.
Then a crow lit on a branch outside
and practiced a repertoire of yawks
and clicks, yelps and carrocks,
maybe telling the whole story

Interview with Brendan Galvin by Thomas Reiter

Given that about eighty-five percent of Americans now live in urban settings, it probably isn't a brilliant strategy to write about the natural world as much as I do, but it appears to have chosen me, what I see and hear daily and what attracts me. For a while I was wondering what it would feel like to stop writing poems about birds, but then I bought Ted Hughes's Collected Poems and discovered a slew of terrific bird poems that he'd never included in earlier books. That took care of my bird problem.