Terry’s sister lies there wide awake.
She hears the clunk of logs below, then the sinking
confirmation of a slamming pan. The stove lid rattles in fury
at her father’s placating murmur. A top stair creaks—
Terry, wanting to be out and gone to the rink.
She senses an altered light at her window, a sign
of spring. The outer kitchen door would be open to cool
things off. Judy is thinking the birds will soon be back.
If she could fly. If she could fly like them and join
their shrill and lifting songs, ribboning out a satin gown
of her own. Her mother’s voice begins to rise again.
Then under her window the mailman coming up the step,
a scrabble of claws on the kitchen floor and a crash
as the dog goes after him through the screen.
Letters everywhere. Helping to pick them up,
she feels the softening crust beneath her slippered feet.
Later she sits at the kitchen table, watching her father
squaring a pile of crumbs, one of his faraway
games. The winter door is closed again and the screen door
dangles on a shattered frame. Judy thinks about a large and broken
bird, a solitary awkward crane, whose only hope was immobility
and keeping silent as a stick. “Have to get at that pretty quick,”
she hears her father say, “before the mosquitoes
hatch and eat us alive.”
The dog lifts his head suspiciously. She sees
he’s back where he likes to lie, behind her mother’s stove,
an adopted Alsatian devoted to her who, through it all,
hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even turned when Terry left, dragging
his pads half through, half past the broken door. Judy watches
the shoulder moving with the wooden spoon. She hears
the handle rap against the rim, and deep in the pot,
the jubilant boiling all over again.