"The feeling heart does not tire of carrying ballast." – Jane Hirshfield
She knows where
it's legal to bury
the ashes of a human being.
Deep in woods,
she hides her old husband
under land for which
he fought a fire
and won. Wilderness
has attempted a comeback
here, pine again,
almost waist high.
She builds nesting boxes –
the special kind for bluebirds –
and hangs them in the sun
to lose the smell of nails.
In time, she sets them
among the high spruce
that surrounds
saplings in the process
of reclaiming burned space
and his unmarked grave.
The birds arrive.
Every year, a shy
blue circle raises
its generation of song.
She keeps track of the woodpecker –
trouble in a red hat –
lured to the area by
a subdivision's fresh supply
of shingled roofs.
Sure enough,
woodpecker populations
increase,
while gradually
a bluebird region of sky
begins giving up its music.
She baits traps
with suet and chauffeurs
sounds of hammering
to faraway trees
infested with a famous beetle.
She guards her nesting boxes
and the melodies native
to my uncle's place.
She shakes her white head,
asking what we're all coming to –
though she knows –
and turns with her world
which goes around
the other way.
Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012