Singly and in turn, or together
in small numbers, they fly up
out of the hawthorn thicket, spooked
or blown into the air, so anonymous
in the immense and neutral winter
one could be another.
And this is what you want:
to see them glide back down
again to the branch or sill or feeder
where each is transformed, an intimate
particular to the eye, the sum of
its own familial story.
In the old story my brother
is the boy who can’t sit still
sitting still for hours, transfixed by
their quick erratic traffic outside
his window. He brought birds home
in his pocket, his cap,
the cup of his hands, knowing
they might be saved, but never
kept. What he loved was flight—the lift
and thrust and drag of it—a wonder
he imagined he could restore them to
with his full implement
of care, so that when he held them
up to the window, light, like air,
seemed to breathe motion back into them.
And when they died he took them
apart, wing by wing with a knife,
to be sure he knew
what he knew. Muscle, bone, feather,
genus and species, seed-feeders,
insect-eaters, junco, finch, or sparrow—
when they come to ground they are
stone and snow and memory, all
the season has spared.
This poem first appeared in Third Coast.
—
Myrna Stone is the author of six books of poems. A two-time Ohioana Book Award Finalist, her work has appeared in seventeen anthologies and in over fifty journals including Poetry, Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a full fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year award, and the 2017 New Letters Prize in Poetry.
