Apricot Press

Two Canada geese fly anterior to the moon,
My car flies over the road. Time to pack your bags.
We are going on a trip. It is not a mystery
The sun will welcome us on the other side
Of the mountain where the cabin is. Don’t worry
We’ll all get to sleep in cedar bunkbeds soon.
At the top of a ski lift, there are chipmunks
Waiting to take peanuts from our hands,
Even though the squirrels back home are hungry.
My grandmother says is that a squirrel or a rat?!
When I introduce her to the ferret. All these
Small mammals, and still, the geese are what we follow.
Maybe because they have the kind of view
That spreads like the dome of the top of a crystal
Ball. It seems they must be more intelligent
To have to travel as far as they do, or maybe
They are just more prey to the wind than we thought.
Either way, the moon allows them passage
Toward its interior, us, wingless and undeserving
Along with them. When a bird flies toward the moon,
Here is what happens: There are a finite number
Of birds in the world, and they must be recycled.
The moon is the mother egg. Once they are old
And only capable of a last long flight, it takes them
Back under its yolk, and next year, in the spring,
Spits out small pieces into twigs and grasses primed
For the meteors. These are protected by the birds still
On earth, until the moon gives permission, by her absence
Or her thin veil of light, by her presence as a crescent
Or half of her behind a thickening cloud, to hatch.

Speaking of birds hatching, I’ve got another memory
to tell. I guess this is confessional, in its own small
way. The grackles I watch from behind the windshield
of a car, sparkling in their parking lot iridescence, once
lived inside a nest made up of my hair. At least, I imagine
this is how, one spring evening, my mother returned
to find us scooping the see-through bodies off the floor
of the garage and into a box, heated some way I don’t
remember, entangled in the fine wisps of blonde.
This spring, we fed the baby birds until they fattened up
with feathers, and let them fly. One came wrestling back
to get me and found its newly scaled and capable feet
stuck in my scalp. Apparently I was scared, but I only
remember feeling the power of God touching us,
the concrete slab suddenly becoming a river at whose
pooling tributaries near the road we watched closely,
with sticks, for the fish, the barn where a Pocahontas figurine
was kept sprung up overnight, the place the bird, I don’t remember
what kind, actually, whose mother knocked him out of his nest,
became ours to bear to flighthood, and so, we did it.
And I watched the movie where the girl teaches geese to fly
with some homemade plane contraption, and they go on
to be wild. Oh, to be so free. And the bird came back
the next year, in the tree in the backyard, and you might ask
how we knew which, and I might tell you, I’d left the pieces
of hair cut off to make bangs in the branches like ornaments,
and I’ll tell you what, if you checked for DNA in the nest it made,
you might find those wisps, you might find, I might just be right.

Photo credit: Marcos Paulo Prado