A Still LIfe

 

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.