in·ter·tex·tu·al·i·ty

Chimney Swifts

It was this same time: an early winter.
Columns of black birds undulated
across the paling sky at evening,
soundless. I’m grown. Where I live now, the cold
will bring snow. But there, then, it meant only
less light, moderate cold, damp sadness, robbed
of lucidity, framed in magnolia,
yella pine, and papery blades of grass.

I know now that you had spent that whole day
packing, pacing, retreating upstairs to
your round brass ashtray: like a whispering
bowl, a quarry of crumbling granite, and
filters turned the color of weak sun-tea.

I can see the jet-black, perennial
birds, not perched like others, but clinging on
tightly to red brick, any horizontal
surface, like a magic trick, or a child
in a new place, pleading to be picked up.

Winter was your off-season: no deer
to hunt, no teams to coach ‘til spring. The shallow
cold brought thoughts that stopped you from speaking; pale,
drawn, your waxen face was like I’d never
seen it in my thirteen years. Caved eyes
replaced your amber ones. Eerie quiet
at rest in the house. The word depression
circled on black wings, banking and turning.

That winter the doorknob to your office
fell off. I could push my pointer finger into
the square hole in the tiny battering
ram, touching the opaque plastic switch, click,
and the door opened. When you replaced it;
it was with one that locked. She kept coming:
frosted bob around Her doll-face, dull with
make-up. She wore Her shirts too low; you sat
back, a yellow legal pad on your lap.
Manila folders, piled with papers to be
graded were alone in witnessing the act.

Anther, stamen, calyx, sepal, stigma.
Igneous, sedimentary; the sill
and fluting, metamorphic, plate tectonics.
Your words echoed, coloring the world outside
and under the half-moon windows. Whatever
She professed not to know, you invited
to teach Her. And then, you left us with winter.

The nest, a waning moon of mimosa
twigs, saliva-glued, together, to the
open chimney. One to five eggs, in this
case two surviving, (Me, and Buddy)
color: white, born: naked and helpless.
In decline, reasons unknown.

When winter comes, do you see us as we
were that day? Flushed from playing in the yard,
following your mottled wool socks up the
driveway, alighting on the cream sofa,
listening to the man sitting on the glass table,
to the words, I no longer love your mother,
crying, crying, like the hungry chimney swifts.