Aviculturalists prefer their birds in naturalistic
open-style aviaries unlike this hospital’s
gift-store-Valentine’s diorama I keep
looping back to, avoiding Surgical Waiting’s
gregarious and nest sleepers stocked
with board games or pillows. Behind glass, a lone
Tri-Colored Nun Finch; two Frosted
Peach Canaries clutch frizzing fists of rope,
basket nests dangling at the apogee
of kissing Ceramic Hedgehogs. An aluminum tree
shivers the landing of Zebra and Star
Finches who settle among badges
of red-felt hearts. So tiny, these birds, nothing
like the only Bohemian Waxwing I’ve ever
spotted in my yard or yesterday’s stains
left against the glass he’d
flung himself hard to death at, spatters inked
so darkly purple who would believe
a living heart had pumped them.
Ominous, one day before my father’s last
presurgery recital for his bed’s hem of interns
how the three-years-ago surgeon cracked
open his chest to discover the porcelain aorta that
couldn’t be clamped. Lips lecture-pursed, my father’s
right hand punctuates air in professorial
mudra, thumb pressed to index finger:
knowledge mudra, though he doesn’t
know it. Pinky winged
ever skyward, touch middle fingers
to thumb, and you’d get heart mudra. No glossy
crimson card stock, the oldest
surviving Valentine’s a poem that Charles, Duke
of Orléans, penned his wife from his
Tower of London chamber, imprisoned
since the Battle of Agincourt, famous for the first
mass use of the English longbow
made of yew so scarce by 1472 a Statute
of Westminster mandated every docking ship deliver
per tun of goods, four bowstaves yew. Four hours
post pre-op, Gloster Fancy Canaries
and European Goldfinches hold court
inches from the window buttressed
by tiny tin trays of birdseed rain-bowed brightly
as sugar sprinkles on the Inaugural Day cake
giddy staff, paper flags cocked
from surgical caps, carry
away from the cafeteria across
the atrium from Pintail Whydahs and Red-Headed
Parrot Finches crisscrossing the glassed air
of Society Finches which do not occur
in the wild. Ditto this Stuffed Goose
and Gander in Wedding Veil and Tuxedo
Jacket centering the view you could enter
in a free-flight hall where bird-watchers
sail through curtains of cords and every door
is wire-netted. The door
through my father’s ribs was wired
shut three years ago, bracing
that surgery’s failure, the damaged valve left flailing like a tiny
broken wing. The world’s largest aviary breaks
into thunder on the hour, sanctuary dome spattering
rain to cordate leaves which twitch like the necks
of perching birds, listening: Blue-Faced
Parrot Finches, Blue-Capped Cordon
Bleu Finches—Blue Babies’ formerly
fatally flawed hearts surgeons learned to resculpt
fifty years ago but it’s my elderly
father floating above me in a surgical theater
undergoing apico-aortic conduit implantation, his heart to be
punched and stitched to a plastic stint tipped
with the pig valve that for years could very well
save his life. What makes this
experimental isn’t the blood’s
radical rerouting but the heart kept
continuously beating. The myth
about hummingbirds is perpetual
motion, that their wings
must never stall: Turtle doves the first aviaries
perpetually stilled were continuously fed
millet sweetened with wine, dried figs chewed to pulp
to plump them for market, but these bright,
slight birds flitting their hospital home are
not for sale, and caging may or may not
save them from the narrowing tunnel
of extinction that also holds the ancient
Egyptian belief if your heart weighs lighter
than the Feather of Maat, you will join
Osiris in the afterlife, but if you fail the scales
the demon Ammut will eat your heart and thus
vanish your soul. What percent of a feather
frames a passage for air? 1651, a freak accident leaves air
free-flowing the gaping chest
of an aristocrat’s son; his pumping heart
could be directly observed, even
touched, as did King Charles the First
of England, that royal hand reaching through mystery’s
swung-open cage. None of this hurt
the young man, who, history writes, lived out
a normal life span. The numbers
line up in the signage, but how do they measure
wingspan for these tiny blips
of turquoise or magenta, Gouldian Finches
in caps bright and variable as the surgeon team’s
sharp relief to the puffy showerlike one
in spaceman silver the pre-op nurse
beknighted my father with as the lead doctor drew
a finger across his chest to show
where they would cut. When Hanuman tore open
his own chest it was to reveal how literal
his fidelity, the beloved faces of Ram
and Sita tattooed on his still-
beating heart, stamped indelibly as the ♥
first imprinted on coins of Cyrene in homage
to the Silphium seedpod, the plant, reliable
birth control, enriching that North African
city-state until harvested, yes,
to extinction. Layson Honeyeater, Black
Mamo, Passenger Pigeon, Crested
Sheldrake: How many species of birds
have gone missing since the 1904 St. Louis
World’s Fair raised in wire the world’s largest
flight cage, before aviaries evolved to glassed
miniature natural habitats or that of the latest
upcoming holiday for which loopy
cursive cards and small stuffed animals
are available at the hospital
gift store along with heart pillows
to cushion the hurt of a loved one’s post-
surgical coughing? You never know
who will survive to the point
of that pain; my father may simply
walk out of this place with his name
still braceleting his wrist, IV bruises blooming
papery skin like pressed tea roses
pasted along this hall culminating
in a velvet ♥ encircled by several cherubs
on the wing. ♥ has two wings but
the human heart, four chambers,
no wings. Chamber in the sixteenth century
meant a certain ordnance to fire
salutes from guns that replaced
the longbow, thereby allowing the yew’s
return to British forests
and Cupid’s tiny arrow to appear
merely quaint centering the hospital’s
main entry into this lobby I’ve wandered
back to where on a dozen televisions
the new president has just
sworn his oath; in the broadcast
small thunder of a 21-gun salute, departing visitors
paused before the screens move on
into their day, gleaming automatic doors
sliding open to the freshly manicured wing
of hedge flagging the hospital’s
brick facade where an early spring’s late morning lilts
into music, scattered chirpings
rising from the green.
What seemed a scattering of grass-torn seeds clarifies
as levitation, my lap’s notebook
dusted with wings—midges both paper
and ink, breath and alphabet, as Shadrach releases us
from shore, poling the mokoro-trafficked clear-cut
Recalling the fossil of your longing
for elsewhere, what golden orb spiders, reed
to reed, have veiled with webs I can’t help
but raze, my face both bow and blade,
an unhoused spider’s dark filigree of amber pearls
briefly jeweling my hand. What’s lost
most remains: Each spindled shadow’s the stain
of a long-gone season’s deeper green
fringing these waters my twenty-years-ago husband
scrubbed his wedding ring away to
with a frying pan’s grit, only our guide urging return
to sift the shifting sand of those sweet shallows we’d
long since decamped. This much
I’ve learned—what’s rinsed in flow
roots in sand; what rises from flood dries still
to a bristling hiss. Hippo grass, your food
and your shelter, can grow so rich it starves
the channel, and so itself, though
however beautifully balanced to clot
your every need, even the most perfect lagoon you’ll
eventually abandon. Invisible,
mute, the current I trail my fingers to braids
an elaborate calligraphy: Lily stems snarled
to drowned bouquets beneath a leaf-fanned surface
undulating with midge-drenched blooms
as Shadrach names each aquatic grass
and flower—Vein Ink, Bullrush, Riverbed Tea, Magic
Quarri—before landing a half-swamped island
for game walking, a pack lunch we share, cigarettes he swears
he’s giving up. No animals in sight, he names me
the trees—Jackal Berry, Leadwood, Rain—that fashioned a history
we both remember: dugouts his boat only mimics now
in fiberglass, no longer to feed the diminishing
of trees long lost to the shoulders
of tomorrow’s sand road, white tarmac ashen as the view
I’ll abandon, a room’s mosquito net wound
to a gauze chandelier hovering above a still
made-up bed. Ashen as the museum’s
glassed remains: Hippopotamus amphibius, fetus
decades bleaching. How far you’ve traveled, River
Horse, from Herodotus, from Job’s Behemoth, the first
of the works of God, to this doll-perfect
stall, a half-formed smile’s unlit wick
clipped before the first flare
of breath, before a single letting go
to sink to the safety of sand, river bottom you would
have so deftly run. Animated here only
in freeze: a diorama’s painted background for birds
dangling in faux flight—Fishing Eagle,
Orange Hornbill, Red-Eyed Dove
whose call Shadrach echoed so I might know it
after, alone—when I would hear it, still unshored
by memory, his hand on my shoulder
to turn me not to him but
to you, River Horse, finally skating the pooled horizon
as if all you needed of world was water
and sky: not the halo of blood sweat that saves you
from burn; not the failing sun, the golden noose
of late afternoon light you rose through, that immersion
in warmth the ghost of a palm too briefly
lingering—Shadrach, the one who entered the flame
in faith, who embraced the fire,
who was not consumed.
Midnight’s staccato, the dog’s warning bark, heralded
your backyard debut: bayed to the chain-
link curtain, in my flashlight’s
spotlight, you, a perfect tableau
the dog’s eager breath fogged but failed
to dampen, your throat sporting
the fur stole of its costumed
unbreathing, your limp tail’s pink curl nearly
noosing your skull’s bone Mohawk—sagittal crest
in spectacular stasis a nod
to your larger-than-life predecessor, role first
created by stone. Your unblinking eyes, a gold scrim—bourbon
and ground glass. A dream
artist’s model, how you could hold
to gesture: You survived by convincing
survival was beyond you, death a diversion
you cued from your pores I’d chase
with drugstore perfumes.
Oh stacked vials of pills, oh sweet
rescue, razors beneath the tongue—melodrama
melded us but for your act’s
one fatal flaw: youth
you hung to, thin hiss you couldn’t resist
as I held you too close to breast
and bone, lifting your towel-swaddled, stiffened body
to safety’s wreath
of long grass. What revived you to the serial
scatter of your kind wasn’t
my light’s lost audience, turning my back
to drag inside the dog now wildly
flinging himself at the gate
closed between you; any new moon
center-staging you, and you’d
hit asphalt, haunting the highway whose shoulder you live
to scavenge—dotted white line basting the abandoned
to away, fastest way out to the next
best thing. Your eyes’ green-gold plates flashing
whose lonely headlights
this time, far from this yard’s blackened
apron and the dog still
raking the fence for any
bitter lingering, dog I’m left calling
and calling from midnight’s tar, your starry rain.