Debris
*
We didn’t see it come in.
It was just a black dot, a crayon flake,
a quarter-note you almost crushed,
until it chirped and surprised us both.
“A baby bird,” I said all at once.
“Probably from the storm,” you said—each word measured.
We had to lie on our stomachs to look it in the eyes.
Our curiosities made it tense,
and like everything when it’s frightened,
it wanted to fight to us. After it tired,
our hands slipped under its wings.
First yours, then mine.
Its tiny weightless bones
made me think of escape
and Wilbur Wright’s left ankle
in that famous photograph.
You knew the one.
*
We had been to the pet store before
and played with the birds there.
They pecked at our curled fingers
and climbed us in search of openings.
Their claws on the top of our heads
tangled in our hair
like the long tooth picks teachers used
when they called us outside to search for lice.
I wanted to lie and say I hadn’t been checked.
“Pet.” I never liked that word. “It seems to come with chains.”
“Like all words,” you said.
“Like all words.” I was your eager echo.
*
We brought it food and made it a nest
of what was available:
a restaurant’s menu
and a bundle of pine needles.
Its wing had white specks
where God had a change of heart
and tried to erase the whole bird.
We had a change of heart
and wanted to release it into the backyard.
We wanted it to have brothers
and proper worms.
We wanted to be heroes.
We wanted.
It was easy to make it leave,
but harder to forget.
We left at different times
to find distractions. Outside,
the storm had knocked so much loose.
Those of us who survived
took walks and saw things we once owned,
but did not recognize,
like hearing a nursery rhyme for the first time without its melody.
*
I came home first and learned
what the human stink does to other things.
The way it leaves residue on glass or film,
and other sensitive materials that corrode,
if given time.
I wanted to be acquitted of our theft.
But this is one of nature’s laws,
whether we knew it or not:
some things will die because you touch them,
and some things will die because you never do.
With my hands, I cupped our crime
like a black stone.
I wanted to hold everything like this,
like it might wake up at any moment
and take flight.
I could feel
its heart muffled in my palms.
Or was it my own?
The heart plays tricks sometimes,
beating in places where it’s not.
*First Appeared in One, The Journal