To a Wren on Calvary

“Prince Jesus, crush those bastards ...”
—Francois Villon, Grand Testament

It is the unremarkable that will last,

As in Brueghel’s camouflage, where the wren’s withheld,

While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are they other birds?)

Are busily unraveling eyelashes & pupils

From sunburned thieves outstretched on scaffolds,

Their last vision obscured by wings, then broken, entered.

I cannot tell whether their blood spurts, or just spills,

Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered.

The twittering they hear is the final trespass.

And all later luxuries—the half-dressed neighbor couple

Shouting insults at each other just beyond

Her bra on a cluttered windowsill, then ceasing it when

A door was slammed to emphasize, like trouble,

The quiet flowing into things then, spreading its wake

From the child’s toy left out on a lawn

To the broken treatise of jet-trails drifting above—seem

Keel scrapes on the shores of some enlarging mistake,

A wrong so wide no one can speak of it now in the town

That once had seemed, like its supporting factories

That manufactured poems & weaponry,

Like such a good idea. And wasn’t it everyone’s?

Wasn’t the sad pleasure of assembly lines a replica

Of the wren’s perfect, camouflaged self-sufficiency,

And of its refusal even to be pretty,

Surviving in a plumage dull enough to blend in with

A hemline of smoke, sky, & a serene indifference?

The dead wren I found on a gravel drive

One morning, all beige above and off-white

Underneath, the body lighter, no more than a vacant tent

Of oily feathers stretched, blent, & lacquered shut

Against the world—was a world I couldn’t touch.

And in its skull a snow of lice had set up such

An altar, the congregation spreading from the tongue

To round, bare sills that had been its eyes, I let

It drop, my hand changed for a moment

By a thing so common it was never once distracted from

The nothing all wrens meant, the one feather on the road.

No feeding in the wake of cavalry or kings changed it.

Even in the end it swerved away, & made the abrupt

Riddle all things come to seem ... irrelevant:

The tucked claws clutched emptiness like a stick.

And if Death whispered as always in the language of curling

Leaves, or a later one that makes us stranger,

“Don’t you come near me motherfucker”;

If the tang of metal in slang made the New World fertile,

Still ... as they resumed their quarrel in the quiet air,

I could hear the species cheep in what they said ...

Until their voices rose. Until the sound of a slap erased

A world, & the woman, in a music stripped of all prayer,

Began sobbing, & the man become bystander cried O Jesus.

In the sky, the first stars were already faint

And timeless, but what could they matter to that boy, blent

To no choir, who saw at last the clean wings of indifferent

Hunger, & despair? Around him the other petty thieves,

With arms outstretched, & eyes pecked out by birds, reclined,

Fastened forever to scaffolds which gradually would cover

An Empire’s hills & line its roads as far

As anyone escaping in a cart could see, his swerving mind

On the dark brimming up in everything, the reins

Going slack in his hand as the cart slows, & stops,

And the horse sees its own breath go out

Onto the cold air, & gazes after the off-white plume,

And seems amazed by it, by its breath, by everything.

But the man slumped behind it, dangling a lost nail

Between his lips, only stares at the swishing tail,

At each white breath going out, thinning, & then vanishing,

For he has grown tired of amazing things.

Copyright Credit: Larry Levis, “To a Wren on Cavalry” from The Widening Spell of the Leaves. Copyright © 1991 by Larry Levis. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.upress.pitt.edu.

Source: The Widening Spell of the Leaves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)