The Thing With Feathers
It’s the first thing you hear in the morning,
the last you hear at night.
In the woods, in the swamps,
in the old steeple, in the ruined eaves,
over the wreckage of a car
your mother drove straight into a wall.
The bird won’t stop singing.
It is perched in the ashes of a house that burned to the ground.
Wherever you move, it’s one hop
ahead of you. Tireless
as a creek, it’s a tune that will not allow itself
to be forgotten. It keeps building
and leaving its nest, all chatter, all expectation,
water singing to itself
in the shadows as well as in the sunlight.
That insufferable optimist.No matter how many doors you slam,
curses you shout, rocks you throw,
it pipes up louder than ever
on this very branch of this very tree outside your house
— as if stones must be your way of applauding.
It was singing the morning you got fired,
the day you brought grief to the person
you most wanted to protect,
the evening when the great cause you’d pledged yourself to
failed. It sang
while your father was writing his suicide note,
the night your dear friend told you he was HIV-positive,
the night you could find nothing remaining
to believe in, when all you wanted
was to be left alone. It sings in places so dark
you can’t see into them.
It’s out there singing now.— November 2005