The Work of Small Birds

Juncos and Nuthatches wait for Magpies to stop

pecking the suet basket, clean up crumbs

they drop. Chickadees wait too. On winter break,

I wait for my husband to return from work

after doing my own work grading journals.

Work: that giant, voracious, black and white bird,

shoulders blue-sheened with empty praise

of nobility to replace adequate compensation,

that racket scaring off the timid beaks in our chests

longing for anything new to do in this small town

beyond observing birds, walking the dog, witnessing

a shawl of cloud slip over silent mountains, binging

the lives of fictional characters from a coach seat,

that sedentary train of working-class, world travel,

our basket robbed of opportunity, something

greasy, something seedy to feed our small hours.

A Gift

Beneath a simple, lit tree on a wide couch

flanked by dogs, I sleep in the home

of my grown sons and their father.

In the dark morning, after he starts

his car now brushed of fresh snow,

waiting to carry him over icy roads

to the shop basement where he tunes skis—

the old way, he assures guests, in the lineage

of his father, born of mountains—my baby,

twenty now, hands me a crinkly package

wrapped in last year’s salvaged snowmen print.

Both of us smile in anticipation. Tugging

at tape, I unfold the seam to reveal

the indigo coat he bought me for the hill

where our family once refound itself, healed,

whole. We revel in it, this moment a son

first clothes his mother against a chill,

one still within his nascent, gracious control.

Carpenter Hands

Hand in hand, resting

near the fire and in between

the comings and goings,

I trace his rough, stiff fingers

with my own papery ones, study

salty palm lines like pine rings,

circle the swollen splinter inside

his palm like a hopeful seed,

as if dropped by an ancient tree

in the dark wood of him

to become him if it could. Fingers—

once broken, now bent-healed twigs

of knotted knuckles and raspy,

calloused tips— surge buds,

strange blooms: whole homes,

warm rooms, sunny domes,

my skin. A burgeoning.

Run-Chicken

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Our chickens plucked each other all year. Bald backs. Bloody rumps. Pecking order, people call it.

For months, I tried everything: solitary and paired caging of bullies, then the bullied, in a corner

of the run. They didn’t stop. Five minutes free, the lead tormentor jumped the sweetest one.

I gave her to another flock, who, starting at a square one, reportedly reformed. Still, her brutal

habits carried on in the remaining hens. Cruelty is both inborn and learned as self-defense. Come

molt, I bought feather fixer feed. October brought gold and bitter cold. Hens mostly stopped laying.

The automatic, light-sensitive chicken coop door—made by a start-up in Ukraine, pre-war,

a country, strangely, shaped like a running chicken, I swear: that marketable logo emblazoned

proudly on the door—froze up, stayed closed, trapped chickens in the warmth. Busy, I missed it.

(How could one now dare complain to a company in Ukraine to seek a motor’s replacement?)

Two days later, squinting, the birds emerged, new feathers sprouting like toothpicks from necks,

backs, once-hacked wings and tails; some already bleeding stumps on the handsome brown one,

the usual target. Damn it. I prayed a little, I guess, to whatever abstract chicken goodness exists,

that as the hens would finally see each other fully plumed, whole again, they’d quit craving blood

and power, live and let live, prove themselves better than men. By December, they did. They did.

Lovers’ Narratology

While it is true

the eyes, smile, physique

stir the sea

of love’s young chemistry

it is finally our stories—

the telling, a shared belief

in outgrown shells we trade

glinting in hands

clicking in pockets

calcified remnants of old longings

oft told cautionary tales

bobbing in bottles raked from foam

of stars that left us lost, of whales,

childhood’s eyeless, sunken corpse,

the ocean floor—that build

a boat into which

we push and lift each other

from slate green waves

suck salt from teeth

reach for oars

To-do Lists

I wake at the usual time with no alarm

on a day he can finally cash in the dawn, 

those hours his body sleeps best, having been 

up from three to five, as always, with the stars.

I wait, turn on the spit of morning boredom 

over random dreams that come unwanted

to the well-rested, restless, vaguely hoping 

or reading this and that, writing a line or two

in a dusty book. Get up to let the dog out.

Make our tea and coffee. Now he’s awake 

in the hall in his robe. Hi, Nakey, he says, 

pouring cream and honey. Goose pimpled,

I slip on a zippered hoody, use the bathroom. 

Wash. We sit in bed sipping, me writing 

a quick text, him scrolling news and reviews 

of a new version of his old phone. Our cups 

empty. He stands, groans, touches his back, 

slides into Carharts, a t-shirt, plumbing plans. 

Leaves. Propped against two pillows, I fight

the sting, think of pulling wild sunflowers 

from the stone path, shaking their corpses 

like autumn rattles to spread black seeds 

across vulnerable, disturbed soil surrounding 

our vacant greenhouse, almost plumbed, 

where we spent some other Saturday pulling 

hundreds of sun-sharpened tumbleweeds, 

all gone to seed, arms bleeding, destined 

for the slash pile, a scheduled winter fire.

lit

it is hard to guess

what dead friends

are up to. we try.

is jack still scat-

steering the night,

one hand waving

an onyx phallus 

overhead like a flare,

the other wild 

on the wheel

of the moon?

are james’ big sky 

country eyes still 

sharp as down

on the angel of shavano,

climbing her lone pine?

do you hear her

baby talking the

red wing blackbirds, 

cooing at that squirrel,

patiently snapping 

elm twigs

for the final fire?

or have they both

long ago flown the smoke,

mesmerized no more

by visible breath,

gone, swallowed up,

inhaled by light, each 

the pure silent word

they always were,

flint at the lips.

in loving memory of poets Laurie James and Jack Mueller

Deliverance

From wherever you are, I guess you’ve seen 

I’ve written all the ways you abandoned me. 

But not today. There will be more: soggy little 

madeleines waiting to unearth more grief, 

but also more of something else I can’t quite find 

one word for: joy? love? warmth? Too simple. 

Your diamonds, Dad, so few in the proverbial rough: 

that matted teddy bear. That antibiotic syringe 

you delivered after midnight from Chicago 

to my Sangamon river childhood fever. 

That Illinois sunset drive—me just home from college 

abroad—you driving us through the low, orange light

of the neighborhood, slow, talking about the meaning 

of life, not the usual Mormon lines, but yours, 

that pithy philosophy earned by imperfect living 

and loving Louis L’Amour as much or more than scripture,

those good ‘ol boy aphorisms only white guys

dream up, pass to sons and son-like daughters 

like campfire liquor. I wasn’t quite the right audience,

but still I polished off every shot, happy just to talk.

That Utah hike, the one that made me cry for hours, 

mountain love our new and short-lived bond. 

That one a few years after that. Two hikes are what 

we got. Our Rocky Mountain smiles. That phone call 

after my second divorce, the one in which I said 

I understood how you could leave and forgave you

and your voice cracked into 3 words: Thank you, buddy.

That other precious, pacing call, the one in which

your recent Lewy bodies diagnosis made you say,

If I ever forget you, just know I’ll never forget you. 

I always wanted more of you. That’s all. Hungry, 

I picked you apart, all your warts and flaws, piled high

your bigot bones to talk myself out of needing you. 

I chewed you up, your every rib of error my fuel. 

I don’t think I am cruel. I even made a costume

out of you, tried on your blues. Learned and buried

you. Birthed, exhumed you from my chest, the whole 

mess of us, no longer a child stuck at the precipice

of your absence, forever six. Today, I am fifty-one, 

full grown, sprung like Athena from your head-

stone. When my throat burns with pride at my own

daughter’s life, firefighter like you, proudly displaying

your retired helmet and walking in your huge boots—

lifting severed legs from cars, their warmth a rising mist; 

pumping life back into crumpled children; shrunken, 

pallid drug addicts; stinking, stained homeless men; 

suburban mothers and CEOs hunched over plates 

of steaks, choked; delivering dogs from flaming 

windows; finding them dead under beds (which makes 

her cry); scolding hotly the father who taped shut 

his disabled daughter’s mouthy mouth, a joke, he said—

I realize while you weren’t saving me, weren’t building 

my bones with the million moments many fathers 

give like milk to children weaning from their mothers, 

that milk of presence, fortitude, you did give thirty 

years of mornings and interrupted sleep to pulling 

countless people out between the legs of death, 

the mother of their worst moment, delivering, saving 

multitudes of sentient beings, every one my mother, 

your mother, in myriad other lives, the Buddha said. 

For this, I thank you, buddy. Your mother, we all, 

are proud, hold you in the arms of our gratitude, promise, 

in turn, with love, to save you—from yourself, your dead, 

that lineage of fathers who left you in the womb.

Though I Cringe When White Poets Write Poems about Coyotes

tonight one howled north

at the foot of the mountain

and its echo howled south

talking to itself, enlarging

its lonesome pack by sonic

subterfuge. One times one 

still equals one. Stopped 

in our tracks by the eerie

symmetrical tune, my dog’s 

head followed the howl back 

and forth, back and forth, 

a slow metronome.

The Story Goes

Did you ever cry, Granny, as a tiny girl, an old woman,

missing your missing father—sun-stroked in an Illinois field,

so the story goes, and never quite the same (tap the head)

after that. Or torn by some disorder without that helpful word—

found by grandkids in a 1950 census to have spent four decades

behind security hospital bars, having once thrown a man

down a flight of stairs, declared criminally insane. (Dead,

you told your sons, my father died when I was young). It is not

your lie but truth that feeds my terror. Did you decide

to spare your boys that swallowed pain, that shame,

stoic, your mouth ever turning a cheek to their kisses,

to ours, no granddad for them to speak of? Did they know?

Or did you simply fear his seed in them and pray for drought.

Pregnant with my father, holding the hand of a toddler,

did you watch your husband, lost inside, exhausted,

drive off past the last gasp of the Great Depression?

Did he truly leave you three for California gold

as you always told them: that no good S.O.B.,

the family refrain? Did you know he later claimed

he tried to see them but was told to stay away

by your husband? Your sons don’t need you, I imagine

you spat like bloody teeth from the door frame.

They think you nothing but a no good S.O.B. So, he gave up.

You changed Dad’s middle and last name to match

his new father’s, a gentle dairy farmer, who saved them,

like my stepfather saved me, made them tough.

Thank you. If only erasing a father’s name were enough.

I want to think you did it all to stop the secret crying,

so young, so old, the way I did, the way I spent a lifetime

trying to matter to your son after he left us four kids

for his own 70s gold: freedom on a yellow-striped road,

a nurse’s bed—that rumor sent through a slant-lit phone

that shrank my mother down to a mute claw. Still,

I didn’t escape my father’s wily thread: left husbands,

too, for more, for more. Gave up on marriage to live.

Those years I loved him best, Granny, bested him,

your ex and your dad, too. (I wish I knew. I wish I knew.)

My kids would never miss their fathers, never long for me.

We fill the emptiness inside each other like nesting dolls,

seeking, never finding, the smallest nor largest doll—

that ancient animal one that holds or is the core

of us all—nor even the doll we are, just sensing that tiny,

receding, insatiable hole, as if it were only ours.