The Real in Poughkeepsie

On extended wing under a cloud over slow traffic a redtail
ignores the clatter of diggers, the blood-red plastic jackets
of the sweating workers, ignores the pinhead gold fly lighting
on my little finger, its wings all rainbows, its compound eye
alive among finger-hairs—that will take off towards its own
(how to put it?) salvation, that lies beyond everything except
what Woolf calls the feeling of the singing of the real world
which may be found too in stony fields around Carraroe
coloured suddenly with sweating couples: mushroom pickers
bent to their task where briary brambles swagging stone walls
grow plump and gleam-obsidian, sweet with the heavy onset
of another blackberry harvest that we, with the birds, will relish.