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Thinking about birds, all those lives parallel to ours, and a word
alights, too heavy for their slight bodies
unburdened as they are; what they build is easy
as breath, weightless as the cloud— shaped cup under leaves
a flycatcher has pieced together with twigs, threads
and a ragged length of wool that waves like a banner.
Twice I walk past; each time she takes me lightly
into her eyes, returns my gaze so brightly, so creature to creature—
this brown-as-a-mouse bird— that my soul is shaken
open, expands and takes wing
tenderness ; yes, tender, as a bruise is.
I’d noticed her hands before, large and quiet in her lap as she listened through all the words for the sound she wanted, the call from her scrap of daughter, fed on demand while we waited
and I thought of how she’d hold that feather-weight in one hand while the other cupped the warm head with its beating fontanelle close to her breast as if that soft suck and tug were all the world
and she could forget the knife, (one of a set), with the serrated edge we’d seen already, an ordinary kitchen knife, its ten-inch blade nestling securely inside a cling-wrapped box.
But it was the photo made me cry—her hand, in colour, the palm flat for the camera, fingers stretched apart to show the base of each cut to the bone, ragged wounds only half healed:
how painful it must have been to open out the sheltering fist, uncurl her fingers and feel the tight scabs crack, exposed for an indifferent photographer to record the naked truth.
And the moment all the others led up to and away from – the moment before her hand lost its grip on a handle made slippery with his blood, slid down the blade?—that, we couldn’t see.
‘What is description, after all, but encoded desire?’ Mark Doty, ‘Description’
Such a presence, glimpsed unexpectedly from the window, and so luminous my heart jumps: it could be the bird,
the very same woodpecker, stepped out of the poem I’d imagined it into, the one who came to my friend
the afternoon her husband died, carrying her into its realm of varied light and, like this bird
looming brilliant over the lawn, neither avatar nor apparition but warm-blooded as I am.
Walking later through woods in little bursts of rain, the light soft and peaty, trees dripping
on sweet-smelling white dead-nettles, (the yellow archangel coming much later, more acrid and pungent in the wet),
I listen to the evening chorus while at the back of it all, another bird drums out Morse code, double quick,
and there’s so much to attend to – all those voices—that I think if we could decipher even a part,
our flesh and bones might become transparent and our skin glow gold, like a Buddha’s.
Such desire!—and it’s not that we long for flowers and birds more than people, but they’re so close, so small
and tender, unfearful of death or heartache, that they can’t help but awaken love easily.
For hours I’ve sat here in the garden, reading, and now there’s a soft click, click, from the walnut tree on the wild patch
and a black chequered woodpecker tapping its beak on the thick bark, a flash of red on its vent.
‘All promises are fleshed or now they fail.’ Charles Tomlinson, ‘October’.
Although this pair are making towards wilt-down they’re still all sap and go in the late summer scuff of the hedge,
two naked stems springing from dusty twigs and dry jumble, the few berries on each tip
in orange clusters, their skins tight to bursting, inviting and shiny as if they’d been varnished.
On this dark August day their fruit are bright pomegranates packed with seeds, seed-pearls,
pearly eggs, and I think of promises fleshed and failed, and how hard it is to feel the freshness of things
but Lords and Ladies know nothing of that; their torchlight draws small animals who snuff up ripeness in globules
and carry the seeds safe in their warm gut before leaving them, careless, uncovered, to fend for themselves.
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