Sorrow and Bird

In sharp flames, like knives gnashing
he burned the stiffened bluebird
he’d found crumpled at the lilac’s toe.
In life and in death
he’d always imagined more possibilities,
a prettier aster under the dulling cellophane,
love not a vine, but a wick running deep.

Why shouldn’t men flap their arms and fly?
Why not birds riding red bikes
or moo-cows raking the fallen leaves?
And the world, he assumed,
would do as well flat as round,
given that you must travel so far removed
to make any sense of the shape.
What use a circle, a globe, a whole planet
when you can stand only on a single flat place
at any given time?

Of what use death
if you cannot be alive as well?

Basketed in weaves of quackgrass and knapweed,
fuming, smoldering,
the bird’s wings pulled into tinseled fists—
closing, closing,
just before erupting brightly,
a new thing, ephemeral.
A new thing.

--Mitchell Hegman