A Still Life
Once, when I was a boy
I brought him a dead bird. “Here,”
he said, putting it to my nose,
“smell freedom.”
Tom
Crawford
Yellow-Breasted
Chat
Somehow the gloves are too much
though I do pick up
the bluebird with them on—
the grass where he lay is still
last year’s grass where only a few
weeks ago, winter beat her last
retreat. There were
ants
discovering his beak, and I touched
him with my thumb to brush
them off but they continued on
with their business.
He seemed
only moments
dead, & I cupped him in my
gloved palm curved
like a nest. I
thought, how
did you die? I
thought: you look
so, oh I don’t know,
alive! I thought: you
are
so blue! I thought: I’ve
never seen
such blue so close
to me. I thought:
I am sorry
you won’t see spring through
to summer or your probably
already begun brood. Now
the dead
seem to flit in and out
of my making my way to the taller
grass where I saw a young
fox a week ago. In a
little
bowl of a knoll, hands now
bare, (have you ever
held a bird like this, close
to your wrist & fingers, its weight
shaking the world under you, and you,
numb with love and sorrow?
Have you?)
If I were John
James Audubon I would have set
the bird on a perch, on an edge
of a water filled tin or ceramic
or mosaic bath. I
would have
posed him, opened his wings, & by
some trick made him briefly alive
again. But the gods
did not
make me an Audubon.
They made me
a dropped seed. They
made this
circumstance of meeting
and the eventual grass and maybe
that fox, they made
the mathematics of it, the equation
of what’s random, what’s
circumstance, what’s coin-
cadence of one moment being a being
beating the air and next being a being
at rest in the hands of a lesser blaze.
