I am looking at a photograph of what is left
of a bird—hollow, bones
branching like streams, replaced
by twigs;
she is wingless, long-beaked, still.
Something in her beak asks
me to recall
high-chinned certainty
that the bird my dad loved
was called morning
dove. Because it sang me awake,
and I hadn’t traced the spiral of its coo.
She is deep into death.
It is difficult to tell her apart
from the rock beneath her. I tell
myself that she was a dove.
Watching morning defrost
on the windshield
in the driveway,
windows lowered an inch, the void
between Dad’s cupped hands launching
fine spirals through window-cracks
into the day.
Soon: claws
of five landed morning doves on the glass, scraping
brief glyphs
into the receding frost,
and then the engine, fracas of wings,
blind flaps toward disappearing.
Even the tree
that she, collapsing, fed
is still,
fallen beside her. Even
when she is alive, a mourning
dove exists also in the past tense.
One afternoon, I notice
yellow in the fingernails
on his still-cupped hands;
something new in the branching
of his veins—streams
threatening flood then drought.
I want to ask
if her song changed to anticipate
the dying? If it did—
did the sound
thin or
cascade in the gathering dusk?
It hardly thinned,
I guess, or she answers, and I am not
caught by surprise by this
whorl of birdsong,
turning faster than what hands can hold