JOSEPH HUTCHISON

Colibries

The whirr of hummingbirds gladdens the morning like musical light a spangled dancer scatters. Something green in the sound, a mid-May wildness. The world is a flower, it says, and the taste of it is sacred.
            A wind comes tumbling down now from the southward mountains. The hummingbirds don’t hide. They play. One whose throat’s the color of ripe papaya shoots upward eighty feet or so, then pivots into a buzzing dive. Now two others join in. They dart and loop like the small, swift hands of Mayan women embroidering milk-white cotton cloth. Bright threads—turquoise, lime, the yellow of maize and the red of frangipani—follow the needles as they pierce and pierce the material. Each needle’s thinner than a hummingbird beak—pico de colibrí, they say, which sounds even thinner, even sharper.
            Now the wind relents, and the colibries flit back to the feeder we’ve filled with sugar water and hung under the north-facing eave. The little birds sip at it, sip at it rapidly—each sleek body a green star pulsing in a blur of wings.

Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate (2014-2019), has published 20 collections, most recently Under Sleep’s New Moon; The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; and Marked Men. His poems have appeared widely in journals—most recently in Pedestal, New York Quarterly, THINK Journal, and Poetry Salzburg Review—and in numerous anthologies, including New Poets of the American West and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. He lives with is wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver.