Summer Story

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels
of the blossoms
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in the world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power–
that nobody owns

or could buy
even for a hillside of money–
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and how here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heart beat ahead of breaking–
and I am the hunger and assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight and shaking