Living on James Wright

üying on.lariies^LVrighl Derek Sheffield As they aim their laser pens over charts, ornithologists calmly explain the slow, sloping descent of neotropical migrants. They open factual arms in dim rooms to show the size of Ohio, puckering widows and one dirty river become the yardstick for South America's clear-cuts. He would catch the yellow warbler that clutched my hand today, its song of hurried sweets. As he broke his lines for the warm tap of its heart, a hobo would appear, wearing apologetic smiles, and a boy with rusty hair, a real deadeye, sighting down a gleaming barrel for another slurred silhouette. Even the blips of northbound vireos each spring along the branch between Americas would cast in his lyric a green wing. I heard him once, lone Ohioan opening his throat three thousand miles from the gathering outlines of his state. And when that yellow warbler lay in my palm, thinned from its journey, Ecotone: reimagining place a breath of fierce light searching me with one dark eye, I stood as if I did not breathe and only wind could move me. ...