Susan Comninos
Poetry
Susan Comninos is a widely published poet and author of a recent book of poems, Out of Nowhere (Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press/Texas A&M, 2022). Her creative work has appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review, among others. Since 2017, she has taught writing to undergraduates at Siena College, The College of St. Rose, and SUNY Albany, as well as diverse groups of adults in the community. “Wild Joy of Receiving” is the title poem of her current book manuscript. She lives in upstate New York.
Wild Joy of Receiving
or, a walker spots mute swans in a park’s flooded field
They’re all about bobbing for a meal, these birds,
adapting to ruin, their grass newly
underwater. Theirs are beaks-at-supper:
bills plunging—so they all look headless.
Necky divers in a slough: reverse
planters, nibblers of contingency, swamped
creatures, impossibly pretty. Wings shut,
their backs are like sheets of scalloped hair
combs, tiered and round; like grey cookies
plucked from a tin. They eat, oddly. Nothing
halts their practice of dunking prayer: this damp
amen; this dip of their heads; this plunk and slide
of their streamlined bodies. Reverently, they
needle worms. Like blades of grass, they stab the ocean
that last night’s rain left. Dumb sailors, the swans
mindlessly boat on a sad sea, inches deep, when
a walker knows how quickly the weather turns; how swiftly
life goes under. Still, on spying green
guano on a nearby path — that dried promised
land—a walker slips a thought upwards. For now,
Noah’s dove can quit her task. Today, the world’s
been saved by signs of life in a sodden place. For here
are the half-sunken birds—not aloft or at home
in a pond, but still feeding. What do they want? More
seeds, yanked from the wet. What do they search for?—what
we all do: dinner, a kind god. A full throat. Webbed
feet that pulse and stretch. The wild joy of receiving.
“
This poem began at a park, following my visit to a desperately ill family member in the hospital. Terrified, I was trying to walk off my panic, when I came across a feeding frenzy. Some birds were having at a sweep of drowned grass. But they looked less frantic than gripped by an overwhelming life force. I noticed they were beautiful. It wasn’t until later that I realized: they hadn’t made any noise. At the time, I was struck largely by their ability to adapt to the ruin that had followed a massive rain. I hadn’t expected comfort, but stumbled across it.”
