Ginger Murchison – Ⅰ

Whitman’s Hermit Thrush 

 

 

 

 

The brightest star down, it’s this gray-brown meager bird’s

sweet, reedy mourning, that one brittle pitch,

 

grief large enough for the pain, an orange wire

right through the brain, a bullet to bite on,

 

one piece of clean, cold metal scraping another

like hunger, a train with its brakes on.

 

That tiny shy bird looks like nothing out there, but that one clear note

of song on and on is the screech of a screen door—

 

somebody leaving

or someone come home.