I buried a blue jay today
perfect body, plume and beak
in my garden compost pile
deep enough to make a difference.
The bird must have fallen
from a low hemlock branch
in a protected cul-de-sac.
For three days I watched that death
give plush color to my brown and grey
outdoors. There have been other
fatalities after the weather turned:
a wren, finch and robin
all without loss of hope.
But this blue jay silenced a chorus.
The forsythia are not the flaming yellow
we have come to expect.
No one would be surpirsed
if the tulip tree bloomed
straight to vegetable ash.
The blue jays in my garden
should not wait the ripe September
cherry trees to feed their young.
This war has sucked the spirit
out of life.
I can open my window
up to the knuckle joint.
The last soldier to die
was from Smalltown, Pennsylvania.
His dying was quicker
than saying his town
his last breath
nearly as short as his life.
After the Killing
After the killing is done
what we have left
is a palette of innocent blood
as if all art ended
and began that April day.
A digital colossus stands
in our multi-screen nightmare--
pistols parked at semaphore letter "N"
in salute to his own negation.
An elderly Jew who lost
her family in the Holocaust
said of the dead:
"And the young didn't have to go to Iraq.
Sometimes darkness comes
even on beautiful days.
A Jew sacrificed his life for his students.
We all bled together--
Vietnam, India, Peru, the Philippines ..."
She drew a crude map of the world
on a table napkin
with every continent touching.
"Wasn't this how we started?"
and with that formed a fist.
A man in a veterans's hat
round, squat and still
sits in a folding chair
outside a Safeway supermarket
selling poppies to the late
afternoon Friday rush
to commemorate warriors
lost in the citizen mist.
Once you've been in the ranks
the military always
stops you in your tracks:
"What was your war," I ask
in a shorthand run at history
handing him a dollar.
"WW II," he replied
speaking out of a deep crouch
before falling back into himself.
In a serious kind of banter
like I was filling up a huge space
I responded "Vietnam"
as if that was punctuation enough
and knew I had opened the door
to the next battalion
going off to fight, equipped
with small words
that like a clipped salute
or an effortless right oblique
can hold as much love
as a fighting man can muster.