It
is easier to be compassionate when one has time: I
took strawberries to the old woman who lives down the road.
I helped another one to her car. A
butterfly lay on the dirt road and I picked it up by its wing. Already in writing it, the event has changed; say I
saw right away the butterfly's body was crushed, say its wing smudged my thumb. Say it rained all day and all yesterday and ruined
the strawberries in the field, so that leaves me at the old lady's door empty-handed. I am done with compassion: I wish someone would tell me to stop, to get down
on the floor with the dog, where I could admire light from the window coming through glass
vases. So it is a small thing, change of self,
change of light. Already what I meant to say
is further away than when I began; the question is reduced to whether the dog barked when
our real estate agent unrolled her yellow tape measure. Or whether the lilting bird in the pines kept calling its two-step call into
the day, into me.
Purple
Martins, 1970
Even
if pictures tell the truth,
whose
hand cradles that month-old purple martin,
like
the new moon cradles the old? Hers?
I
can see the wrinkles. One pert black eye,
a
seed, dull light, and feathers sharpened to points.
And
after, did my blue-eyed grandfather drop the bird
to
its nest? Did their hands brush?
My
grandparents kissed and laughed across the table
in
Christmas movies, her hair dark, his shirt pressed. Once
she tumbled into
the lake on a shoot for Audubon--
he
rescued the camera first; the expense!
This
picture is taken to show the band;
a thin metal ring encircles its leg
but this baby bird doesn't scare.
I've held them myself, hands cupped full of feathers and skin
I can almost see through, skin like that on my grandfather's hands.
Their hearts against my palms, my eyelashes black
against my cheeks, I look down, down at my hands.
The dark calms them, my grandfather said,
so we'd lift them to his leather satchel,
then squeeze the metal bands with pliers
while their parents scolded and divebombed our heads.
People
mailed him the bands they found
from birds killed on highways or dropped
who knows why. He sorted them into glass jars
while I spun on his office chair,
then held down one electric typewriter key
in a long metallic wail and it sounded like he was counting
his pocket change, like nails spilled
on a cement floor, or like smooth white stones
dropped into a lake, one by one, everything lost.
