The Red Bird

I say my body’s wicked, and it’s so,not through accident nor environmentaldisorder, but attained in a wicked way.

As a youth I was as pious as scholarlyand at the maddest period of youthwent to the desert, looking for relic and sign,

afoot scrabbler toward rapture. Youth hasmany madnesses, and I was drawnaway from the living antiquity of the soul.

Performing a complicated satisfaction,my first satisfaction, there was a crackingand my body has stayed in pleasure’s contortion.

Home, when I reached it, was no longera place of understanding. Who loved methe earth has swallowed. But I stay on.

Night’s a struggle for uneasy sleep.I try bed, couch, rug by the bookcasewhere slant of floor makes slight comfort.

Sunup brings me knees and hunger.Nothing’s in the house anymore,nothing open in my ancestor’s town until lunch,

I walk to downtown’s whitewashed storefronts,the town name in plaster, parked carsfrocked with dust of penitent roads.

A live oak grows stunted from the sidewalk,a tree given bitter leaves to hold a season’s hand.I hear in it a parrot shriek, no, a moan:

an imitation of moan. The branches stiras if a child climbs there, or hasand now cannot get down. I know the local

fauna, due to my strange, reclusive upbringing,studying birds, wolves, the sharp and toxic,rats, rat snakes, snakes that eat snakes,

what forgoes eating and withers in fields,but now the reverse, the glamour of being watchedin the ancient vocabulary of hunger and taste.

Now, against the disturbance in the oak,kinship stirred, for the moan was my own:my nightly agony learned and misinterpreted,

as if I had been suffering in a court of law,and concluding my oratory had askedthe court reporter to read it back to me.

From the sound and weight in the branchesI assumed a giant bird, or an ape or not animalbut cloud, some loose

dirigible of misery that would from branchesemanate and envelop me in its miasma.When it appears, it is, or has merely

taken the shape of, a finch,every variety of red: bloodshot bloomingcardinal burgundy cherry copper magenta maroon

rose ruby rust scarlet vermilion and wine-stain.It ignites the street and flies three intoxicatedcircles above the parking spaces, and alights

on my shoulder, truly alit, as from its feathersI feel a heat as from a larger flame,as one long cold standing too near a fire.

“They’re waiting,” it sings in my ear. “Follow.”It flies ahead in rhythmic fluttering jaunt,hovers until I catch up in my slow way.

Although this is the town of my birth,and I am many years old,I find myself in an unfamiliar plaza,

with a crowd. A wind disturbs the noonshadows around a gallows. Some childrenblow bubbles or sell pistachios. On the platform

two figures polite to one another,one the mayor, my charming cousin, tallwith a blue blouse tucked into her jeans,

the other a handsome stranger, spryand strong, his hands agile toward the mayor.The bird claws pull me forward. The crowd

parts as I climb rough stairs and ask my role.“Why, cousin, to pull this clothespin here,”and showed me what held the trapdoor shut,

a Shaker pin, and I closed my hand over its grin.The stranger ties a noose. The bird hoods him.With a thwap the trapdoor drops and the man falls.

But just at the snap, the man turns into a red fluttering.And not seen since. For me, the world darkens.I turn my head everywhere, see black

until the mayor lifts my hood, folds itinto a wooden case. I stand upright. I turnmy body at the waist. I touch my toes.

I pull myself up on the scaffold bar.My pains are gone, every ache and crink.A bubble floats from where children were,

and as it passes I glimpse my reflection,distorted enough to...