Duncan Campbell holds an MFA in writing from the University of New Hampshire. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in more than a dozen journals, including burntdistrict, elimae, Ghost Ocean, Stoneboat, Sun’s Skeleton, and Transom. He was the recipient of the Edward R. and Frances S. Collins Literary Prize in 2010 and the Dick Shea Memorial Award in 2012. Duncan lives in Huguenot, New York, and, in addition to work in outdoor education, he co-edits Paper Nautilus.---------
The Odd Man
He fell out of some muddy storybook,
hobbled into town like an injured dream.
When one of the girls screamed at the sight of him
he gave her a polished bone. There was nothing
where one of his legs was supposed to be,
an empty trouser-leg knotted loosely below his waist.
Leaning on his crutch he looked like he could have
frightened birds off the cornfields for a living.
Nobody wanted to touch him for what made him
foreign to us. He didn’t work or couldn’t
and so asked instead as a way of earning.
When asking failed, there were alternatives.
One morning, after a late-season frost, we found him
unlatched and asleep on a classroom floor,
and chased him off with rocks in our fists.
He could dance a frayed button between his fingers
until it disappeared, laugh coins we had sworn
to keep from our pockets, though none of us
ever complained about giving them up.
Some of the boys said he crept into our homes
at night and took food from our pantries while we slept.
He left before he could go stale, vanished
like a man pursued. Few noticed
he had gone, but the children remembered.
He was road-smoke that dirtied our shoes,
the sheen in east-facing windows,
a sound of floorboards contorting in the night
we shut our eyes against.
Dawn of Feathers
I know only, remember
only the little one,
just a dawn of feathers
that the family cat knocked
from its spruce nest when I
was eight. Convinced it was
a mourning dove, we packaged it
in a shoebox and drove
to the clinic so it could
die, miraculously, the instant
a gloved hand touched it.
Starling, not mourning
dove the bird-doctor said—like it
mattered—and my mother added,
in the words that her father
had given her in the
sullen days of her blue
Ohioan youth, that starlings
are worthless pests, that a net
of them in the sky could threaten
much larger birds, like Cessnas or Boeings.
In Denmark men call
them the Black Sun because
of what their flocks do.
This one, just a handful of bluish flesh
in a shoebox, but if I draped one wing
over my eyes I thought, I might see
the sky the Danish do,
and, as in an ocean-shell, hear
voices choked inside its throat.