print previewBird Ephemera
after the daybooks of Emma Bell Miles, 1879–1919,
essayist, poet, and naturalist, Signal Mountain, Tennessee
the canned fruit bursts it is
frozen solid
so long the sound is
quieter than it ought
to be quiet as the birdless
tree of ice that bore
the peaches there is no mess
there ought to be
I hear of worse a woman
bedridden her legs
her feet freeze
blacken a quiet wither
this begins as penciled observation
sometimes words a birdcall heard
sometimes an outline eye-
draft a drawing in greater detail if an
hour opens
its frozen gate map
of the bird primaries
coverts secondaries lore
the pages begin to fill I
carry it everywhere
in an apron pocket
to the field the spring
a gully the base of a tree
a map a chart
anatomy tarsus I think
of this eyestripe
when he is on me
in this the record
of what winters
over survives
with us thrasher
hermit thrush what
leaves what leaves
the field is the same here
as what leaves the eye
if I have this evidence
of a bird recorded
nuthatch waxwing there is
evidence of me
what I don’t say here
is not
and all is not what it
seems muscle
memory of fire and iron-laden water
the new
baby much
like any other
the confinement the same same
trunk lid
its cradle
the man the way he worries
a stump out
of the ground the way
he rocks it cradling
loose tooth the way he fails
the same gives up folds his hands
in his lap for now
the spine goes brittle the glue
turns to sand sprig
of fern dried in the pages
brittle comb fragile
teeth sky-slight shadow
remains the failing
of all color
a shadow is the same
as a cave my twin
brother died before I
drew a breath I have
to cut one
of my dresses into two
for the girls
I had expected the one
to die before winter
not to learn to tell one
apart from the other
I cannot bear
another child another
winter another year
another unimaginable
the enemies of the bird
man the elements
accident other anomalies
birds of prey snakes
my own the same
the butcher bird
impales smaller birds
snakes and moles impales them
on barbwire and thorns
the weapon of this world
a tent consumptive
on the grounds of the hospital
a lung collapsing collapsing
light a pole sunk
straight through the middle
of the air
the neighbor’s baby dies
again a day
drags its length a cowbell
drags its sound
no it is wind
the hem of this
dress dragging the ground
miscarriage I will call it
suicide I drank what I had
heard a tincture tansy cohosh
pennyroyal primrose
mistletoe what had hung
from a lintel at Christmastime
and still it clung
only to die at its birth
limp infant dead word
on a pillowslip stained with it
a wren in the tent it enters
easy as air moving easy
as grief
it eats from my hand it mistakes
my hair for the stuff
of a nest lichen from a boulder
spider’s web hornet’s nest
for the nest itself
I wave it away it returns
unafraid as though
I am not altogether me
something made from the elsewhere
a thing to dissemble
on the water shelf
by the bucket
a nest lined
with lichen stolen
remolded in it
a shell halved blue
thimble needleless eye
the blind horse we can
afford the blindness we
afford all that doesn’t
need to see this staggering
passage of ground
lace a remnant of curtain
for a bookmark a text
of bird and vine saved
for this recollection
of a window a warbled
pane of glass now
this slip of a passage
a child lives long enough
to slip fixed into a name
scarlet fever closing it closing
the throat he tells me some other
house I’m gonna go to some
other house what other
house has he ever been to
his brow smoothed then some
other hand smoothing it
the kittens die
all and still she looks
for them calls swollen
for them she is not
this she is cat animal-
all whose young survive
her have long forgotten
her when she bellies
under the house to die
having forgotten them all
summer the burning
of sedge grass the cough
the wind weaving a shroud
melancholia the moss
on the stones in the springhouse
burning I turn the children
out naked into the woods
the humid understory thicket
of switches I am never more
than three meals from the nothing
I tell them there is I finish
the last biscuit
watch it disappear
with them
this this a hymn
of shadow it is here my own
translation hurry
hurry a lexicon finished
betrothal was ever this the weld
are you weary the rent
illusion that hour
this one when the thrush
can insist it is
not real and will it is not real
barred owls unseen
caterwaul vesper
sparrows chimney
swifts crisscross intricate
etching of afterimage
their delight in emptying the sky
emptying the eye mine
in the dooryard the swept it is not
real elegance of a finished thing 
Bird Ephemera
Lacuna
A Partial Ledger: Dr. C.D. Bennett