What to Say if the Birds Ask
THE LAKE
I don’t know how Father managed
that summer I was five,
on his factory pay,
to bring us to the glistening lake
and white clapboard cottage
for a week, its small rooms
filled with early July light,
and what seemed to me a thousand birds
singing through the open windows,
past the waving flowered curtains.
Perhaps he borrowed the money
from my uncle, who would be dead a few
years later, at fifty-four, the only time
I ever saw my father weep.
But we were happy those days,
my parents and I,
by that lake called “Silver,”
and in its bright water that returned us,
redeemed and shivering,
back to our currency of air.
Each afternoon, I walked
along the shoreline,
gathering shells and stones
from where the wet sand
touched a mysterious silence
that somehow
echoed through me,
even on that final morning
of clouds and rain,
when we left for home.
WHAT TO SAY IF THE BIRDS ASK
And if clouds gather now like distant cousins,
it’s because weather is the mother of all things
cyclical. And if, through the afternoon rain,
the mail carrier comes with her armful of bills
and rejection, it’s only to remind us of what
we may have yet to receive. But what unsettles
me this gray morning beneath trill and chatter of birds,
signals of a coming storm in a neighborhood of strangers,
is that first death, polished wood and Uncle’s cold hand
when I was nine, the relatives and friends gone since then,
my futile guilt and anger, the failed language of regret.
But if it’s true some words are, finally, the soul’s
lexicon, then I’ll say this: Once, there was a woman
whose shadow blessed the light of a room in Boston,
a man who filled the glasses of his friends with the best wine,
a child who tasted the soft petals of flowers and spoke
their many colors to swans rippling the summer pond
in a silent lyric. Today, alone by the window, I’ve been
translating the repeated warble of sparrows perched
on the maple’s high branches. “What’s next? What’s next?
they ask. “Soon,” I whisper. “Soon, we will know.”
THE GARDEN
In his garden, my friend
has become adept
at mimicking the birds
as now, through the night’s
wet veil, he repeats
their many songs,
until even the prolific
mockingbird must listen.
A curious gecko hangs,
for a moment, over the top
of the porch screen,
then scurries into the shadows.
We’ve been sitting for hours
with drink and conversation.
I’ve just traveled
the Atlantic coast to be here,
and am thinking now
of that wise poet, Po Chu-i,
how he believed in seclusion
and clarity, yet sometimes
welcomed visitors, and once wrote:
Who says the moon is heartless?
It’s followed me a thousand miles.
Tomorrow, we’ll wake
as the red-eyed Cooper’s hawk
rises above the blossoming
purple bougainvillea,
waving banana leaves,
that extravagant bird
of paradise, and the mango
trees heavy with fruit
nearly touching the ground.