Chickadees in October

First tussle of your lungs again
with cold weather, nose dried
from steam heat, sour of blood
in the mouth. Then the life-squeaks-

so many desperate hungers
signaling some unspeakable hope-
of these chickadees at the feeder,
though none becomes a Buddha,

being but scraps of act and clamour,
quick, black, white, open and shut
assemblages of feather and bone
blinking the big dread away

with the sunflower's sweet kernel, brisk
half-minute of the millet's bittersweet.