Wednesday Poem

I found the blue jay on the driveway

under the pink drunk Czechoslovakian-

grandma-planted peonies which were

under the restrained Scotch pine.

The bird’s nape was wide open.

You could kaleidoscope-look

into its neck and see rubber bands

leading to its complex brain.

You could see everywhere

it had ever flown: chaparral, scrub-oak

woodlands, coniferous & oak forests. There

were nuts, & insects, & seeds, & amphibians,

& even a piece or two of snake.

There was a cache of foil-bright objects, &

sounds: zreeks & shook, shook, shook & all

the colors of sex and death. I bent to it,

picked it up and brought it to my heart

like the strange forest pioneer women who took

abandoned bear cubs to their bare breasts

and rock-nursed them in front

of cabin fires until the cubs could live

on their own. I have not often since

had such patience. But then with that

found jay I stroked its wingbars & flight

feathers; I memorized its eye-rings, & crown,

wing coverts, & eye-stripes. And with weeks

and water, food, and breath

I brought it back to flight. For that

short summer I loved it more than myself,

enough to let it go. For months it would not.

Every time I went outside, it flew streetlight

straight to my head or shoulder

where it easy perched. There are photos

of me teenaged giving it milk-blue

bowls of water and photos of me bikini sun-

bathing, the blue jay on my then-

tan, flat belly, the jay feeling deceivingly

light as the first intimate gift-flesh touch

of love, as the children who swell and fall

from our love-soaked bodies, deceiving

as the hollow-boned, song-filled birds

that daily blue-grass drop dream feather

trails throughout our skin-heavy days.