by Laurie Klein
In God’s backyard, roosting birds reawaken the old throes interred within us—personal heartland, tangled as any natural cover, where plumage seamlessly melds with shadows. A glint of eyes, like coals . . . there! Then gone. Who among us can cease, feathering a nest for our dead? Around us, avian clamor distills to a tune, an earworm, a little engine of grief frisking memory: a grandmother’s blessing, limpid as rain, evanescent sheen of notes from a brother’s cornet. Say we stroke onto canvas the pulsing throats we visualize via their sounds: Why, our plein air psyches might render a mourning dove, even Shakespeare’s lark, rising to riff before gates of pearl. O heaven, behold the delicate scrim of the retina, while the soul, with its inmost eye, peers wistfully back into this world, secretly fledging, beyond the breastbone.
Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens (Poeima/Cascade). A past winner of the Thomas Merton prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in the Pacific Northwest..
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