May
31 may Birds here should have names so hard to say you name them over. Someone dead wrote that, but yesterday watching the struggling flycatcher—Hammond’s, Dusky, Willow, I’m not sure—I thought it. Beak pierced by some errant angler’s snagged Gray Wulff, the bird flailed circles around a branch, the monofilament line coiling tighter with each brief orbit. All this while you were teaching. Snow—in the first week of May!—then sunshine, then midges, then mayflies, then stones: the bugs’ wrinkled wings like sheets a body has risen from, late for whatever it had to do. Mary, the warblers, tree swallows, the phoebes, feasted on the numb bugs, dashing down on the river, veering, their bellies white shirts beneath unbuttoned coats. Then snow again and the birds buttoned up, raced for the branches: your students, faces flushed, lined up after recess. All except Shannon, last again, out there playing tetherball alone. It’s May, sweetie, it’s time for class. This morning studying the field guide I can’t tell a Yellow-bellied from a Least, a Pewee from an Olive-sided. Pip-pip, I say there, sings one of them. Pil-pil, sings another, ho-say ma-re-ah. The bird that sang like it had swallowed too much water hung in the man-made gallows, and with the bow rope I broke the branch, with forceps pried the steel from its beak. It lit in a dogwood, bentnecked . The watery sound of the nothing it sang, friable thing gone from my palm. May: how a student slurring her words might say your name. ...
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