An Epistemology of Eggs and Rosebuds
April 11, 2008
I know my hands are birds —
not jays or hawks,
only small puffed chicks.
I’ve never seen them fly
but I’ve heard their excited heartbeats,
felt my wrists lifted
with so many small wingflaps
that pull me up until I smell rain
that hasn’t fallen yet. It is delicious and sweet
but when I try to look at my hands
they freeze.
I never knew about the birds
until I knew about Sam
and about Sam’s favorite park
in all of New Milford.
I met her under bleachers
with a pipe in my hand,
pushing upward, trying to catch up
with something I couldn’t yet name.
“Drugs will never do the trick,”
she told me, “but birdseed might.”
Everybody knew Sam was smart,
but I was the only one who knew
why she said she didn’t believe in magic
when she never agreed with laws
of physics. She would tell me,
from her perch on the left-most swing,
“they will fly away someday.”
She wanted me to treat them better;
she wanted me to know that I was like her
and my hands were going hungry.
Sam reminds me of milk,
the kind in red cartons, and I don’t know why.
I don’t know if Sam drank milk
or if it’s because she showed up early
to school and happily parked
beside the Hood delivery trucks
so everybody else would have room,
or because her words blinked back at me
the way a soft milky morning
can make you forget what it was
that made this place so hard in the first place,
or if she just went well
with coffee, with apple pie.
I don’t know Sam anymore,
but I like to think that someday I will feed myself
enough birdseed that the good in it will seep in
to leave tiny seedling-embryos in my skin
that will burst into feathers,
and my body will be all softness,
fluttering understanding that will draw
the chicks out of hiding, and maybe
they will forgive me, maybe
my hands will fall in love with me
and bring me to live
among the waiting raindrops.