Evening

Sometimes she’s Confucian—

resolute in privation. . . .

Each day, more immobile,

hip not mending, legs swollen;

still she carries her grief

with a hard steadiness.

Twelve years uncompanioned,

there’s no point longing for

what can’t return. This morning,

she tells me, she found a robin

hunched in the damp dirt

by the blossoming white azalea.

Still there at noon—

she went out in the yard

with her 4-pronged metal cane—

it appeared to be dying.

Tonight, when she looked again,

the bird had disappeared and

in its place, under the bush,

was a tiny egg—

“Beautiful robin’s-egg blue”—

she carried carefully indoors.

“Are you keeping it warm?”

I ask—what am I thinking?—

And she: “Gail, I don’t want

a bird, I want a blue egg.”

Copyright Credit: Gail Mazur, “Evening” from Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Copyright © 2001 by Gail Mazur. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: They Can't Take That Away from Me (The University of Chicago Press, 2001)