Birdsong from My Patio
- Birdsong from My Patio
Despair so easy. Hope so hard to bear.
I’ve never heard this much song, trills pure as crystal bells, but not like bells: alive, small rushes of air from the tiny plush lungs of birds tucked in among the stiff leaves of the olive and almond, the lemon with its hard green studs. As the sun slides down newborn from thick muscled clouds their glittering voices catch the light like bits of twirling aluminum. I picture their wrinkled feet curled around thin branches, absorbing pesticide. I see them preening, tainted feathers sliding through their glossy beaks, over their leathery tongues. They’re feeding on contaminated insects, wild seeds glistening with acid rain. And their porous, thin-shelled eggs, bluish or milky or speckled, lying doomed in each intricate nest. Everything is drenched with loss: the wood thrush and starling, the unripe fruit of the lemon tree. With all that’s been ruined these songs impale the air with their sharp, insistent needles. [End Page 64]
ellen bass is the author of Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love, which won the Lambda Literary Award. She has been awarded the Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, and the New Letters Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction books include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into ten languages. She teaches in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University.
