A BOOK OF BIRDS
After “The Viewing” by Duane Keiser


I’ve seen a hundred birds
just like this one in the gray trees
that line Grace Street in Richmond,
the city where Keiser painted this bird’s
still body with its umber wings. Perhaps Grace
is where he found it, here in late-autumn,
the dead bird half-hidden among leaves
the color of dust. It seems right; Richmond
is a city of light and dust, quiet as a vacant house,
its sky cut with the silhouettes of chimneys
and steeples and gaslights, its streets
a vigil of bronze statues that are themselves
watched over by flocks of starlings and larks.

How far away the city seems now,
how much like a book on a shelf
in a room, a book that, looking at this bird,
I must take down again.

But what room? you may ask.
And in what house?

Say memory is a house we build, adding room
onto room throughout our days, each room lined
with shelves, lined with books. Go further--say death
is nothing more than the lock that turns behind us
as we go inside this house we’ve made, go in
and do not come out again. And in that long, last night
the sky opens above the rooftop, black and starlit and vast.

It’s in this house that I take down one book,
Book of the Missing, Book of Regret. I take
the book to the worn chair beside the faint gold
firelight and open it, the room filling with beating wings,
eyes like bright beads, and songs made up
of all the names I’ve known that the birds
pass back and forth in minor notes.

They’re just like the flocks of starlings that ride the wind
in arcs above the pastures where I am now,
the black horses still, their necks bent, their noses
on the frozen ground. The land’s so still here,
the sky above it vast, but above it the birds still turn
and swirl like waves. And at night, the stable lights come on;
I imagine the horses lifted one by one, nothing more than cutouts
placed there by a child’s hand and then put away again.
Above the stars dot the indigo night, each star bright
as desire, each one wide as an eye, each one something
someone, somewhere, lost and never found.

On this painted bird before me, I see
how a smooth cold wind has moved the feathers
from its breast, how its gray-lined lids have stopped
halfway over the dark eye. In that light, the color of bread,
I feel how sudden and ordinary this death,
and I remember how death sleeps so quiet
around us, unseen, the black egg tucked among
the bright blue shells in a nest.

If this small painting were a page, if this work
were mine and not this painter’s, this man
who knows enough of loss to place it here
on this canvas so perfectly, with all its lines and all its hues…

And if writing it all down in that book, the one
hidden away in memory’s fire-lit room,
would bring all that’s been lost
back again, then I would write it. I will.
I will write a book of birds.