burying the bird

you as a soft-throated hatchling –

that’s what I thought of as I watched you die

on a tattered towel I’d laid like a drum skin

over a brass-handled wooden wine bucket

as I watched your wings seem to shrink slightly

your animal resolve expire, your wings stiffen – 

where beside me the lettuces, still growing

had toppled with the swiftness of their growth

had toppled with vital exuberance, green stars –

the dill gone to yellow snowflake seed

the jasmine free of its trusses, branching through

vacant, lowly space, the skein used up –

between the weathered planter box

and your death throes I knelt, cast my shadow over you

like a pall, I cried on you, I swept you up uncurtained

into the greediest of bouquets –

clutching body parts forgotten for a time

I thought how human your eyes were.

·       

a pinwheel spinning on the footpath

stepped over without pity by homesick traffic

feathers turned up by gusts of uncaring

a nervous system spin-out, a broken back

markings like, but neither, dove nor pigeon

I noted as I passed you and then stopped

in an iron rictus – looked back, relinquished

all the world but you, in adolescence, poised to go

and a wind that seemed at once like calm and anguish –

and the braid of my own hands against my fingers

soft as good soil – a softening of precepts I didn’t know

had ossified, and with that I took you up –

if I’d dropped you in the struggle – and

the struggle was unbearable at first, maybe

I’d have bit my tongue and left.

washed my hands with laundry soap

washed my hands of lifecycles, or put you out

to Elysian pastures with my boot heel –

you bucked like a tidal river dammed

but I held on, even managed to scrounge

for my house keys in a docile moment –

when I brought you in it had stopped raining

the fridge motor uttered corrective groans

the kitchen floor was littered with dead leaves –

·       

I searched among my music for a lullaby –

all my lullabies were electronic dance music

which I thought would frighten you (though perhaps

no more than other music would have) – I deferred

to the silence of the empty courtyard - there

I found my compassion waning, and wept for it.

you twisted into the shapes of my nightmares

only for me to re-pose you, like an angel, on your back –

I was behind you – as you spun your head around

and looked at me, I thought of arterial cracks

in the egg I might have outgrown and broken

in another life, in the egg you outgrew and broke

in what would soon be another life –

your breathing slowed to the rate of a sleeping boy’s

your eyelids didn’t open anymore

(although I wouldn’t dig your grave till morning)

and yet still in my despair I couldn’t shake

a different sadness – that no-one would see me bury you.