I keep the thought of you always tucked behind my ear,
Casual but constant,
Like a stray wisp of hair.
Compulsively, I tease it back out to play with it,
An absent-minded tick,
To twirl you around my fingers,
Self-soothing
Your warm smile…
The downy back of your head cupped in my hand as we slow-danced
Reminded me painfully of the time I held a baby bird in the driveway
Of my childhood home.
His fluff a perfect fit in my smaller palms,
My dumbfound awe
The tiny pin pricks of his talons
Offset by the cloud of his untouchable fragility
A dizzying suspicion of duality...
My joy turned to panic
In the face of his trusting innocence
His eggshell bones and thimbleful heartbeat
Encased in nothing more than a brief cough of down
All so small, so precious, so breakable…
And I! At ten, a red and reckless titan
Teetering on a ladder to reach the branch where I found him.
In my haste to return him to his nest
Before I destroyed him with an accidental breath,
I pulled the coiled-spring branch down too hard
And let it go too fast and
The backlash flung him into the open sky
A graceful arc…
For a moment, almost as if you were in flight.
I imagine it might have been exhilarating.
It kills me that you with your good and true soul
Would thank me for such a thing.
He landed on the lawn across the street with a limp and inaudible thud
And I, shaking violently with remorse,
Scooped him back up with fingers I cursed,
Returned him to his home with fingers I cursed.
His gray eyelids blinked up at me still,
Translucently in love:
A grief-stricken conviction.
How many more lessons would it take
In my casual cruelty and haste
Before I would be worthy of your trust?
I wind, unwind the question
In spirals down my still-cursed finger
And tuck it back into place.
I do not know if I am strong enough
To suffer into virtue.
