A Bird That's Come Home

posted Jul 22, 2008

The clouds rise and we alone are lighted
figures on the beach, free-wheeling one evening
along the lagoon chasing the sandpipers

that skip across the surface of the waves.
I say: We are an egg wrapped in paper or straw.
You laugh and say: Break it open.

We go home and argue.
It happens this way. Differences press
our thin membrane. We crack.

Afterward, the room is a mess:
overturned crystal and chairs, pieces
of the speckled murre eggs we stole

from a nesting cliff and spent one whole
winter drying out near the furnace.
Everything breaks. We, too,

are fragile.
You wrap yourself in a shell,
I fly to the shore to contemplate the churning

sea and the birds in it. Gulls float the rough swells.
After all, in the death crack
of Arctic winter the sturdiest birds remain.

But what about us? What phoenix
can plume out of this fissure
to squawk the first notes of our truce?

When I return home, you’re standing
naked, bird-legged, in the kitchen
making cookies, and I turn to yolk.

For one thing,  in the midst of our division
the thought of you stork standing in the dark sea
of appliances, factoring quantities

and degrees, rounding off
the time to keep them
soft morsels me.

But there’s more, like a feather slowly settling,
when you fold your wings again next to me and say:
even in cookies, it’s the egg that holds everything together.