The Jay

I was pegging out your lime-green dress;

you were hoping the last of the sun

might sip the last few beads of drip-dry water

from its lime-green hem.

I had a blister-stigmata the size of an eye

in the palm of my hand

from twisting the point of a screw

into the meat of the house. Those days. Those times.

The bird was crossing the gravel path

in the style of a rowing boat crossing dry land.

Struck with terror when I held it tight

in the gardening-gloves of humankind, we saw for ourselves

the mouse-fur face and black moustache,

the squab of breastmeat under its throat,

the buff-brown coat and blue lapels,

the painted inside of its mouth,

the raw, umbilical flute of its tongue

sucking hard at the sky for the taste of air.

Setting it free, it managed no more than a butterfly stroke

to the shade of the unnamed tree, where we let it be.

They say now that the basis of life

in the form of essential carbon deposits

could have fallen to earth as a meteorite, or comet,

and that lightning strikes from banks of static

delivered the spark that set life spinning. It's a beginning.

But the three-letter bird was death, death thrown in from above,

death as a crash-brained, bone-smashed, cross-feathered bullet,

so we could neither kill it nor love it.