There’s a mountain and a hundred miles
between me and the jazz station, but sometimes
I can live with the static, a kind of extra-tempo
air-drum percussion, the dead singer’s voice
tanged by smokes and too much gin. Some days,
all I want is no news, none of the time.
On the other hand, this afternoon it wasn’t music
pulled me up, but what the field guide calls
the black-chinned hummingbird’s ‘thin, excited chippering’.
It had got itself trapped in the garage, and though
the big door was open, it stayed in the window
through which it could clearly see a world.
By the time I heard it, it was so exhausted
it let itself be cupped in my slow man’s hands,
and emitted, as I closed it in, a single chip then silence.
At the edge of the woods I knelt and opened my hands.
Not even thumb-thick, its body pulsed with breath,
its wings spread across my palm, its eyelash legs
sprawled left and right, indecorously. I stroked it
as lightly as I could, as I might not my lover’s breast
but the down made seemingly of air thereon, and twice.
Then it flew, a slow lilt into the distance. For a while,
even peace seemed possible, in the background
Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’.