I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

TRIPTYCH WITH BIRDS

TRIPTYCH WITH BIRDS for my mother 1 It will rain, and all night it will rain, and the waters will run so dark with tannin for days that the rivers will not slip free of their slick, black boots. And she will be adrift in the glass-bottomed boat of delirium and be, by dawn, beyond reach even though I will have slept the whole night beside her. Look, she will say, I can see straight down and into what I knew would happen: my body, so hungry to live, eating itself. I know the logic of fever is like the logic of a dream and that the body’s appetite can sabotage what it loves best, and I will begin to dream of mouths where no mouths should be. The storm will clear and all afternoon the clouds will move loosely over and the wind will chase its pennants through the grass and sunlight test its tongue along the hedge backs, polishing the coinage of the leaves so they shine like the worn soles of shoes. So much burning without flame. What matters is not what I’ll remember, but how I’ll remember it: not 49 that her breathing will be difficult, but that it will be almost secret, like the first bird waking—no singing, yet, but a delicate stirring in the leaves of the escallonia; not that the first bird will arrive at the feeder, but that a bullfinch will arrive and cling to the slim basket of seeds, his waistcoat on fire. 2 I am up at first light, crows passing over, a run of snips in the sky’s blanched awning, the world’s black lining; on the lawn, two doves in matching collars of pewter, and a solitary robin, that beguiling blaze of his chest an invitation, like a man unbuttoning his shirt in public one button too far. Rain on the helmets and throat guards of the stonechats’ dark armour. Amid the fuss there is always one, grounded by damage, in the grass: a chaffinch, his left foot crushed and twisted, who cannot get a toehold on the thin wire mesh of the feeder. Every morning I find him, gleaning what the rest in their enthusiasm let go—whole seeds, crumbles of suet— 50 and what I feel is more than relief. It is a kind of gratitude. And so late in my life. My mother sleeps on, well past noon, and her sleeping feels like a separate life. I am alone. I have not been abandoned. I watch that bird and the way his wings close, perfectly, against his body like envelopes being sealed; how he waits, without fuss or fanfare, and misses nothing. 3 Out in the bay, a small boat, its rubber skin glistening like a seal’s. Three small figures in scarlet life jackets. The blue clarity of deep water. Blue. Azul. A shadow is bluest when the body casting it has already vanished. I sit with her, inside those pockets of radiance that open up within a storm, and who’s there she cries, startling awake each time the room becomes wild with a sudden yawn of light and I feel it too: a door opening directly from this world and, for a moment, it is everywhere—blue of pressed breath, blue like a taste of history; the fascia-like glare on the spine of a book forced open 51 too far and a body to which similar things are happening. Afterburn of a struck match. There are no blues in the caves of Lascaux. The masks of the Incas were blue. A hawk glides in, low, over the garden, and the birds at the feeder in their panic rise up as the crucifix of its shadow passes over the grass. And so death has slipped into the poem. On the colour wheel, blue is closest to white. Out in the bay the small boat slides behind the curtain of the sun’s late glare on the water. I am thinking of Giotto’s Saint Francis talking to the birds, how the birds stutter down against the blue’s high-minded backdrop; how he painted in a few extra so that he could simply wipe them, deliberately, from the canvas; how their shadows remain, like a dream of a memory about birds. And I understand, now, what he’s saying: that...