The Songbirds Keep Singing Like They Know the Score

My daughter tells me she wrote her first poem
but doesn’t know its name. When I carried her,
I thought a name to call her would be delivered
to me like a package—I’d have a dream
where I rock her and repeat it. What did I expect
from a God whose existence was only ever in doubt?
As a child, I asked my mother what happens when we die,
not to our bodies, but to us. She had celery in her hands,
wet from washing. Set it down, wiped her fingertips
on threadbare blue pants she named groadies.
She turned toward me, exasperated. I don’t
think it’s possible to know. I don’t know what
to believe anymore, why the deceased insist
on reaching for us with their signs and signals
from someplace we aren’t certain exists, and why
some of the dead depart without sending their
avian messengers, without flickering the lights
or piping the song we sang at the funeral
into the grocery store between Top 40 hits:
His Eye Is On the Sparrow. When a palm-sized bird
saw sky reflected in the living room window
and kept going, one second en route and the next
lifeless in the grass below, I asked what happened,
why. She said its fragile neck broke and death,
this time, was not a process: it was one instant,
and that’s life. Our rusted garden shovel scooped
the body, moved it where we wouldn’t have to see.
The next day, a stencil of its wingspan was fixed to the window,
the darkened outline placed over the point where a sparrow
could see only more room for flight.

Letter to Someone Who Won’t Speak to Me Anymore

Once short-term memories become long-term,
can I keep them then? You think your heart is hooked
to your sleeve, visible ventricles & vena cava, but I haven’t had a hint
about you in 140 days. A passing glance

could mean disgust, could mean desire. Could be worse,
could be that you were looking past me
to the woodpecker holes in the siding, entry points
pest control claims to have no dominion over.

The mice mean well, just checking for crumbs and totaling
their days. Not much can be done without first sealing
the opening. Mom wonders if she has a hex on her
because her husbands keep dying.

After my father, she said she would never love again.
Her next husband’s skin hasn’t turned gray yet, jaundice
looks like a tan. He stopped cycling and playing pickleball,
probably won’t touch his paddle again. He also stopped pointing his crooked finger

at me to tell me I’m wrong. He waits and his head hangs
like the peonies after rain. Mom is mad that he’s dying,
mad that he isn’t already gone. All the petals have fallen
to the grass without first floating through the air.