Jeff Hardin

Changing Direction
 
A bird I’ve never seen before alights
and looks around. It does a shimmy dance,
a shiver-breasted brilliance I’d be thrilled
to make my own, if not for all the stares
I’d get, some people wondering just what’s
become of me. I’ll tell you what: I want
to soar; I want to stand atop a mountain;
I want to hear my voice returned to me

across a valley’s fog-brushed lift of light.
I want to change direction, steer myself
along the ripple-dipping downstream-shining
going deeper toward that place that bends
and goes on out of view — to leave on air
a call gone faint that, turned for, 
    				     isn’t there.

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Bennington Review, Image, The Laurel Review, The Louisville Review, Poetry South, Literary Matters, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Zone 3, Cutleaf, and others. He lives and teaches in TN.