Vesper Sparrows

I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air,

shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine

to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed

urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls.

From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried

up the East River to Potter’s Field

as if they were an inheritance,

gleaned of saveable parts,

their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated,

the ashes of metastisized vision

professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh

in air ...

The first time I saw the inside of anything

alive, a downed bird opened cleanly

under my heel. I knelt

to watch the spectral innards shine and quicken,

the heart-whir magnify.

And though I can’t say now what kind of bird it was,

nor the season, spring or autumn, what

dangerous transition,

I have identified so many times that sudden

earnest spasm of the throat in children,

or in the jaundiced faces of the dying,

the lower eye-lids straining upward.

Fear needs its metaphors.

I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal.

Even the sparrows feel it,

nesting this evening in traffic lights.

They must have remembered, long enough to mate,

woods they’ve never seen,

but woods inbred up the long light of instinct,

the streaked siennas of a forest floor

born now into the city,

the oak umbers, and the white tuft

of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow

in which their song, as Burroughs heard it,

could be distinguished:

come-come-where-where-all-together-

down-the-hill ...

here, where every history is forfeited,

where the same names of the different dead greet

each other and commingle

above the hospital’s heaps of garbage.

From the ward windows, fingerprinted,

from the iron-grated ledges,

hundreds flock down for the last feed of the day

and carry off into the charitable dusk what

cannot be digested.

Source: Vesper Sparrows (Atheneum Publishers, 1986)