Of Sparrows
In the mountains with only the wild
animals for company, ghosts
roam the roads, the story
goes. They’re carrying jerrycans, and the wild
grasses wave dimly behind their dim
forms as if snow-
• •
dusted, or dark where they pass
through the wanderers—a bayonet,
a wolf’s tooth—and reemerge
on the other side, the teeth
a wolf’s teeth; she stalks
the frozen river’s surface on nights
when even the fish
whose shapes flicker up through dim shadow-
lands of ice
are sleeping, and no one dares stop
for a stalled vehicle. She—the wolf,
• •
I mean—was born
before the men who’ve died in these hills
were young,
when their fathers were young. Men say
if one is caught
on the mountain when night falls,
they will die
of exposure, and in the hour
that falls before death she will come
to them, to offer the lost
her teat to suckle, and they—these men
• •
who whisper this story among one
another, laughing as men do, as if the mountain isn’t
what they, too, avoid on winter nights—
they are no mere villagers, raising pigeons
to dance for pageantry’s
sake, or to write their owners’ fates
in the script their paths
through the air make mid-
dive; they are city-dwellers like you
and I, with lunch-hour dental appointments
and the telemarketers who call, call them
• •
by first name in an intimacy
as feigned as they do with you
or I; with the palm of a hand each morning
they wipe away the condensation
that fogs the mirror, as if to find a face
reflected back in full. So let’s say this story
is a different one, of a woman
who lives alone, faraway,
in a place we have all heard spoken of
but by no one who has ever been. One night
a traveler comes to her door
• •
to ask for help. How can she know
he has not come to kill
her, as happens
often enough in those parts of the world,
as it does in these? Is it a relief
if the next morning she finds
him frozen, the prints of wild animals making a lace-
work in the snow around him, coming
closer where they have dipped their noses
to his form, knelt to inhale
the scent like warm milk
• •
that rose off the body
as it shed its steam there in the snow?
She, too, carried a gun
as a girl,
which she once used
to kill, and raised a sparrow fallen
from its nest to flit
to and fro from its perch in the palm
of her hand. What,
then, is enough to make her
understood? Must she carry not a rifle
• •
but the head of a man—like you
or I—severed and grasped
by his hair, as if an elegant handbag,
wherever she goes?
A Heron’s Age
The moon lies awake all night, peering down
through pecan canopy. The familiar is no longer: barred owl
that’s built a nest at the base of a tree in the yard,
around which a round wire fence meant to contain
not her, but a white dog who would do her harm, who inhabits
all out-of-doors his chain can orbit, parabola brief
as the breadth of his explorations, or
if shirked, he roves the countryside, losing
his own way home until my brother leaves off circling the fields
in a combine, or his fieldside mechanic’s truck,
to find this animal half as large as either of us, cowering
lost in a ditch where a great blue heron shot by a hunter
laid down the tasseled strands of its head to die
ten years before. Left behind, my world
has been remade: city of swept sidewalks, old men
buying scratch-offs at the donut shop and strangers
who avoid each other’s eyes, missed
connections and casual encounters. Even the owls
are unknown to me. Even the purple-lobed vetch
and the low place in the grass where, longer ago than a heron’s life-
span, a black kid goat lay newly buried under packed dirt,
and longer before that when I lived, every afternoon
for a summer, in a child’s hideout woven for me of branches
by a woman who today talks to demons from outer space, is dying
of breast cancer or curing it by meditating
to exorcism videos, she tells me. Everything I know
is hidden like a caul over the moon means rain, a gesture
at forgetting in service of something better. Put up
like a jar and forgotten until, dark as peaches
preserved by a great aunt three decades gone and even longer
from the house where she did her canning, I find and marvel
at it like a child in an abandoned cellar. We are decay-
ing second by second, and certainty, so within
reach a heron’s age ago, is a winged animal glimpsed
above in the unstitched dark. It knows nothing
of humanness; if it senses me, it is brief as its shadow
passing above through the night, but I name it
a benediction in the instant before it’s gone.