Releasing A Bird
I've been working all of ten minutes when I hear
scraping, chewing, maybe a crunch, a flutter
in the ceiling, and finally recognize it: a bird
caught in the chimney pipe. I wait. No use.
I yank out the bottom-plate. He drops, black
fanning in all directions, flicker one
with crow at this point, and bangs into windows, one
after another. I open what opens, chase him here
and there till he's out the door, heart aflutter,
and soaring over the scrub-willows. Time to block
the chimney cap, I decide. Who wants birds
dropping in forever? So I climb up, use
an old plastic flower pot, then use
the height to scan the horizon, having won
that right by my good deed. Higher than the birds,
white cumulous clouds billow and spill. Here
it's bright, but you can make out shadows and black
thunderheads in the distance. My mood, the flutter
of good will, flag of a my disposition, flutters,
sputters, slackens and droops. The ladder I used
to climb down with I can put away in the back,
and in the cabin I can sit at my desk, one
foot up, slowly rolling back the morning, hear
the parade of sounds and listen to the birds
outside, their commentless unfolding of bird-
song or hoot. But something's gone so utterly,
destabilizing, wrong, my mood slips. I hear
it reel, its scratching attempt to hold on, no use
once the slide begins, like the bird, gone
and not coming back if it knows what's good for it, soot-black,
storm-cloud-black, starling-black and back
there, somewhere in the distance that's blurred
now, that bright light has turned wan
and the bright mood muted, subdued, frittered
away now. What is it happiness doesn't like in us
that it can't stick around? What was here is there
and that's that. Some light's gone the way birds
fly south come winter's flutterings. You push your hair
back. You muse. You start thinking back.
Copyright 2001, Mark Halperin
first appeared in Time As Distance 2001, New Issues (Western
Michigan University)
Mark Halperin teaches at Central Washington University. He has
taught in Japan, Estonia and Russia as well. Time As Distance
is his 4th book of poems.
"Releasing a Bird" is a sestina, a form with 6 six line stanzas and
a 3 line concluding stanza. The same six words that end each line of the
first stanza end lines in following stanzas, but their sequence differs.
In this sestina, rhymes and homonyms of end-words may take their place
at the ends of lines.
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