A Curving Line
Same bird I heard as a child—
Knees to the wall, patterns in the wood.
Wind in the pine boughs shaking
Out light, sunspots, the shaky mirrors of the world.
Beyond the window, before the horses
Or even tree forts—this is first light
Morning, my socked heel
Sliding a celestial arc
Cross the bedroom wall
When from the fence post
It comes again—
Chickadee, says my mother, and it is, is.
Juncos
Eight degrees with wind chill, the dog
takes the rug by the sun’s best window
her statued stare, transfixed by these birds
emerging from a corner row
of boxwood, long gone iris
and peony—blackened and dry
as something an apothecary prized,
unlikely cure among the dead grasses.
Discrete as Quakers in grey hoods,
the juncos fan out in flawed
whorls across the frozen circle
of the garden, minding the rut of paw
and footstep, they tip, dart, list
looking for a lost seed, something risen
as the frozen ground buckled then split.
Their progress is jittery smooth—
think of the chilly brook’s first thaw
its run no more than a murmur
as it slips its broken light
over winter dry pebble and ice
or the lolling heads of narcissus
in a lost wood in northern Virginia.
their frilled cups subject
to unseen wind, infinitesimal shifts.
Thirty miles away, you grow shaky
with tremor, hate to leave the house. Proud,
erudite, charming, my dear friend’s father—
How I wish you could see them:
their shuddery bright moves sheeting loose.
Once you brought me a book about horses
and a shy girl who hid among the hay bales;
it was a way of saying things—
I understood then, as you might now.
Quick, in the flush of light—
before these unlikely beauties retreat
into their evergreen rings of boxwood.
