The Strength to Raise Chickens

I. 

One summer we hung lace

curtains in the window and

kept chickens in the yard.

In the night, you had to run

out with a shotgun to scare

the neighbor dog away from

the coop.  Later, a raccoon

got in and forced a slaughter. 

When we knew what had

happened, we hosed it down,

poured bleach on the floor,

scrubbed everything with a

long-handled brush.  You said

give up—we don’t eat eggs

anyway—but the next spring

you came home with another

box of chicks.  You built an

incubator out of an old door

and some scrap lumber.  We

strung light bulbs from long

cords, dangled them down

brightly close to trembling

beaks, feathers that moved

like dandelions two days shy

of destruction.  Every morning,

you opened the box, which

ended up looking like a coffin,

and scattered feed, scooped

bits of life into hands as big as 
the buckets of a steam shovel, 
and held them to your cheeks.  
But when your mother died, you 
couldn’t do any of this.  Day after 
day, you couldn’t open the curtain, 
couldn’t bare to see dappled 
sunlight on the end of the bed.

II.

a line of

light

at the window

a silhouette

across your

 feet.

She lay in a bed

much like this one

taking      breaths     here, with us,

and    exhaling    them

somewhere

else.           

III.

That’s what you did too, after—

inhaled and exhaled in two different

places.  But you multiplied her,

matched her breath for breath until

your penance outlasted hers.  You

couldn’t tell that you’d been absolved

even before you’d asked for forgiveness. 

Some days, keening in a voice that belonged

to you and someone else, you would hold

your stone of sorrow out for me to see.  Never

letting me hold it, you wanted me to

acknowledge its shape and size, but all

I saw was a golden nugget of amber: tree’s

tear frozen in time; a moment suspended

somewhere else and dropped into your

palm.   And then one day you brought me a

feather, touched it to my face, and told me it

felt like falling asleep in your mother’s lap.

IV.

Grey eyes close in a grey room.

Grey eyes open in a grey dawn.

In the burned fields after a long

fallow, the fire-charred seeds

pop open—the skunk weed 

unfurls in the ditches.

V.

Finally, when the chicks turned feather-slick and

skittish under your thumbs, shied from the tender

tips of your fingers, you turned them out into

the yard.  Each night you herded them back to the

coop, locked it tight and checked the wire on

the window, the gap in the roof.  Every morning you

looked for eggs, threw open the coop door, waved

the stragglers away from the cosmos and watched

the flock skim the ground and flutter into the

low-hanging boughs of the pine at the end of the driveway.