HATS & A MABEL OF CROWS (TWO POEMS)

by Leland James
 

HATS

Hats—
Thrown back, set square, brims bent,
or flat … A hilltop garden
of leafy who-I-ams and –nots.

Chapeaus of self disclosure
dancing to different drummers:
Bills slid 'round, a backwards baseball
cap. A fishing hat with flies.
Propellerd beanies balanced
just so. Sombrero, stovepipe,
porkpie … Bright feathered, flowered,
veiled … All stalking hats
set out to capture the truly who?

The hat fit, the who of it,
can sparkle like a diamond;
a marriage made in heaven.
But tip the hat this way
or that in mere degrees
of idle boast, conceit,
or imitation, and hats
become unscalable peaks, dunce caps,.

The personality, you see,
the warp and weft, the tap
root ( identity) wears the hat.
The hat resides, not rides; it’s you!

To doff or not: do you,
would you, should you? Do you dare?
Are you the cat in the hat?
Some are, some not. As for me,
a man of hats I am not,
not even to hide my balding spot.

 

A MABEL OF CROWS
 

A crow named Betty, I read in the news,
a New Caledonian crow, if that matters
—and this was reported in Science
so I’m guessing it’s true—this crow
bent a piece of wire to fish
a bug out of a hole and did it
again and again, and there’s more I’m told
to know about the crow, this brainy
bird who, as it were, can open a clam
by precision bombing a rock with it
far below; and another crow,
like Betty in a lab somewhere, used one stick
(there’s video) to reach another
better suited to a task at hand.

“What do you make of this, Mabel?”
I asked, fishing about with my pen
to reach a paperclip I’d spied
that had spilled and bounced under a chair.
“God’s got a sense of humor,” she said.
“Or,” now cocking her head, “He builds
out of spare parts, his ideas that is”
[Mabel is a Gatling gun of supposal,
deadly at both long and short range,
firing at will] “or maybe crows
are from outer space, down here, just checking
us out. Perhaps someday a crow
will perch in the senate—the bird might feather
that nest just as well; you know, the crow
might evolve into the national bird
—Theodore Roosevelt wanted the turkey.”
She skipped a beat, narrowing her eyes:
“I doubt we evolved from crows, but you
never know….” Mabel studied me
down on the floor, a look I’d seen
oft times before—not quite a wink,
the hint of a smile—and reaching under
the chair with a hair pin she’d bent
just so, flipped out the clip as neat
as you please, plucked it between her first
finger and thumb, gave it a glance
and dropped it adroitly into a tiny
tin of its brothers—no need for words:
the bird on the news was a Betty, not
Tom, Dick, or Harry or Jerry or Bill.

About Leland James