Poems by Shangri-La Hou

Cardinal Direction

by Shangri-La Hou

From Canary Spring 2023

Shangri-La lives near the headwaters of the Peruque Creek watershed in eastern Missouri, where Northern Cardinals and other birds start to sing again in the spring. She has fond and fresh memories of where she used to live on the Rio Grande—a home that resided in the grand expanse of desert and bosque leading up to the Sandia Mountains.

I’m no ornithologist. But when you’re wading through
shin-deep snow with no jacket, no manufactured layer differentiating
you from your wildness, you become the same as all of the other animals
in the last reaches of winter: waiting out that singular purpose of survival.

If some other Bible-bound man saw you running out, eyes widened upward,
he’d say you were looking for God in that infinite and thawing sky.
Could you prove him wrong? Your eyes dart from red to red on coniferous green,
the searching like a drawl the tongue holds against the hungry cave of its mouth,
or the patient pushing, every year, of bird song against silence.