Cardinal

POETRY CARDINAL / Michael Pettit Outside, the days come, alike with their sunlight and summer heat, extended like a hand in which you see no weapon. It is there: the day comes, and he comes, crimson flash from the surrounding green. Senseless beautiful bird, he sends himself through the air to crash against a window then flutter back, stunned, to the trees. Among the needles of the pine, in the funerary willows, in the bamboo grown straight and tall around an inner emptiness, he rests, recovers to come again. A state of seige: what at first seemed accident takes on purpose. Cardinal, songbird that does not sing, he comes to shatter the quiet you keep inside for him to shatter. At any moment his body will rattle a window, the room, the whole house and you cannot deny you want nothing else. Impossible to say where he'll strike next: you count twenty windows and not one is without its small star of blood. You go from one to another, looking into the trees, offering yourself to the sunlight and to his eye, cocked and watching. You hope he will spread his red wings and his heart will race and he will fly toward the window where you wait, behind a feathery spot of fire in the clear glass, growing larger, matching him wingbeat for wingbeat as he comes on. As he comes on you'll see what is mirrored in his eyes: the joy that drives him. And something else, a terror he must subdue, take inside, filling his senseless beautiful body. The Missouri Review · 7 ...