| C B Follett USA
The Bird is Inside There are times when you recognize things are not as they should be, that the bird should not be on the inside sill looking out. When the child sickened, they thought it was flu, watched her with careful eyes, prepared warm compresses and cold – held her, but never considered the blood, the journey it must make to the heart. And the heart with its serene beat of responsibility, could not tell them the blood it was pumping was not good blood. The news it contained: silent, stalking, showed up like thunder in the tests and the child was at risk, like the bird on the inside sill, she was caught in the open and couldn’t make it back to safety. The world took a turvey spin on itself, a movement out of its natural order. As when the poles tilt, magnetism, taken for granted, shifts its weight. The assumed directions of life correct to northeast or southwest and a new triangle locks into place. A child falls in, like lost planes, like lost birds; a child with faulty blood falls into a hole in the seam of time. As the bird, waiting, on the flaking sill, looks out at the grass and bushes of what it is used to, waits for something to release it, or a river of air to follow in on a sun mote and show the way out. Listen Have you been listening to the voices of rain how they linger behind your ears how they wait with patience for your good attention Consider the small lives beneath the shadows how they weave this Earth together with you with us Go out into the sounds of bark and soil Listen this is a good moment Close the Dutch doors Turn your back to the past Drive down any road and commit to horizons Open your chambered heart Be expectant What’s out there can lead inside the thin edge of miracles always out of reach It’s not necessary to sound the trumpet Lift your hesitant face to the light falling from trees listen Lift your hesitant face to the light falling from trees It’s not necessary to sound the trumpet the thin edge of miracles always out of reach What’s out there can lead you inside Be expectant Open your chambered heart and commit to horizons Drive down any road Close the Dutch doors Turn your back to the past Listen this is a good moment Go out into the sounds of bark and soil how they weave this Earth together with you with us Consider the small lives beneath the shadows how they wait with patience for your good attention how they linger behind your ears Have you been listening to the voices of rain Window When I look again the window is half open into his darkness. Glass caught in years of sunlight is warped, probably brittle. I wonder how close he is to leaning his pale arms on the sill, letting his tongue slide along cool glass when he thinks no one watches. If he sees me, he'll begin to diminish into background and when I look again there will be blinds tilted to the sky, his grey eyes somewhere behind them. We have lived next door and never tied our words together in the street. His eyes shift; his bones, hardly of substance to hold him erect, seem to dare the light only in search of food. At night odd flickers of blue light kick across his ceiling and walls, the only iridescence I imagine is his. Is it company or barrier, when even the glance of a neighbor causes his skin to shrink from air and cling like rawhide, drying around him, compressing all that he is into parchment until reduced and dried he is found entombed in his own scarcity? How important the open window becomes when you think about never. Yes I cannot imagine how the circle of my life will round on itself, this morning is so clarified. Out my window, ravens fluff into something larger and the hemlocks dip at their increase. Below in the shaggy meadow, a gardening shed tilts on an axis doomed to fall And a yellow dog clips along his non-path, searching for earth holes. In the spaces of the day I find no limit to what the eye can see if it sees with the heart, No image so concrete it cannot be stirred with the long handle of attention. Today in the open throat of my life, I cannot wait to get started. Lost and Found My daughter has found her birth mother.
Soft rocks the cradle.
Hard scrabble, this search,
this last search, begun in her gut
somewhere around eight.
Loss colored all her stables.
Rejection rode the winning horse,
balked at the fences, and threw her
in the mud. Again and Again.
One day, she got an answer. Hired
a detective, who took her clues
to the head of the line, and so
she sent a letter. Got one back,
and some pictures. Now at last,
she looks like someone,
is somebody's daughter.
And I wish her
the joy of it, as she rises
out of the mysterious density of loss,
and I fall toward it.
© All Copyright, C B Follett. |
