My Father as Bird
If I could believe he turned into an egret,
white and darting along the edge
of the water. Or the sandpiper almost humorous
in all his scuttling and pecking. If I could
believe his harsh tongue became a garter snake,
leaving its old skin for the new green
of new words – love, the seasons. If I could
remember him climbing a tree. If I could remember
him diving off the side of a cliff, thrilled at the salt
harshness of the water below. What was he—
that spring of skittish leaves. My father now magic,
now wounded and dangerous. Which one
will rise up from what he left, from his gone?
I picture him bluebird. I picture him eagle. I
picture him caracara a block away, studying
the songbirds from behind his hooded eyes.
Aubade for Pain
It’s old the sadness
that you don’t know how to make anything, the words
once like birds now fall like leaves snipped from a
tree by winter
Pain with her long needles. Pain with her smooth mask.
The room without windows or a door
but bone-pale from a light you can’t see,
as if whatever made us—whatever we were made from—
contained a necessary rupture.
What a thing to be locked in a single body,
one hand, then the other, trying to turn themselves
into birds.
Title
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her most recent collection is Radium Dream (Salmon Poetry, 2022). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, selected by Philip Levine. Poems and essays have appeared in Blackbird, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in San Antonio, TX, and Tempe, AZ, where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).