Flown

Dear Betsy

Experience is an intact fruit,

core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open, 

entered, it can't be the same, can it?

                                Mark Doty

                                "Source"

Nothing's showing now but the small

round hole.  A week ago the tree

swallow, the one I watched insist

the air zip and unzip and zip

some more then come to perch, her

miniature claws on the rim

of the open hole.  And inside don't you

imagine the twigs and bits

of dead grasses she sat and sat

then flew from then came back

and sat some more?  Yesterday

not at home or not the day before

when I'd come to mow. Maybe

I got too close?  But I noticed (it's

probably gone now, the wind,

a scythe sighing and sighing)

a brown breast feather and some

of a tail maybe or inferior wing.

I wonder did some predator bird

fly right on by and noticing did it

circle back to attack and crack open

what now mother bird's had to

by nature abandon?  There's not

a lot of noise after the flights

like this are reconsidered.  At first

nothing at all took notice (though

only me to come to stumble

and once in a while look up 

and see everything and all

that was normal and par

for the course but hating I don't

know if she's flown and her chicks

too, through with the little box

with the roof on it, and hope that

ominous feather had blown in from out

of town and was lost long

long before this nest was even

seen and then needed in its dry

and mostly out of sight height.

Love, Christina