Birds Keep Flying In
I don’t know how long the tiny thing
beat frantic time-- the traffic, the clicking
of keys, Ida Cox singing her wild anthem loud
in my ears and when I looked it was a terrified blur
of electric yellow and black and gray
on the wrong side of the glass.
Bearing foolish heavy habits of rescue, I climb
up to coax it the endless thirty eight inches
that measure the distance between here and flying
but I am large and strange and clumsy even to myself
and every lucent feather churns
desperation at my nearness.
I run for sunflower seeds and peanuts
which I will end up sweeping from the floor.
Both of us attending the drone
of a fly that finds the way out when
suddenly my grandmother sings from my tongue, crooning
a whistled lullaby and the head like a yellow cherry stills
for an instant then resumes the futile alchemy
of trying to transmute hard invisible things
into what can be moved through.
My cupped hand is waiting but it won’t stop trying
to save itself without me. Shaking, as I finally
think to place a cup against the window, I realize
I am speaking out loud saying I’m scared too but the sun
is shining on the flowers and the green treetop is so close,
you’re almost there.
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3 comments:
Dawna—This is beautiful and brought tears to my eyes. You've captured so much gut-truth, had the nerve to write it down, and here it is, a thing of grace. I will keep this with me. Thank you.
My turn to thank you for the very kind words. I'm glad you liked it. (I should have my website live in about 2 weeks, and there will be more poems posted there!) It was the second bird that flew inside my place in as many weeks. Not to mention that a week or so before that I communed with a hummingbird at the window box (I seem to be the only person in downtown LA with window boxes...and my friend tells me if I would just plant corn, they could be considered farms! -they're already stuffed with flowers and tomatoes and herbs) that's full of calibrachoa...which evidently, is like hummingbird crack. And I'm never been a bird person...my grandmother is, but I don't know anything about them. Now I know that this little birdie is a carnivore, not a seed eater, based on our mutual attention to the fly! I tell myself that these things seems so much more miraculous to me because they are juxtaposed so sharply with grit and noise and homeless folks and so on...
Have you ever heard the Waifs song "Fourth Floor"? Kinda about that windowbox thing. I wanted to blog it at the music blog, but haven't found a sample on line yet.
More later...
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