FALLEN BIRD

Sharon Jones gave me this poem ten years ago, and I’ve come to love it.  I didn’t understand it back then because I’d yet to become a full-fledged bird.  So, I hung it on the wall, hoping that someday I’d understand what she was trying to tell me. 

That was a time of great turmoil, a sea change.  A time of great beauty and pain, simultaneously, when life and death weren’t so far apart.  A time when I learned that I was an artist. 

But one day I covered up the poem up with a painting, forgetting about it.  It became lost to me.  This past year I wanted so bad to have the poem, to find it hiding behind the forgotten art.  I thought it might have been a dream, the poem and that part of my life.  But the other night, as I was unpacking some things in my new house, I had the feeling the poem was near.  I took the backing off the closest painting, my friend Sandy’s aquarelle of a fountain with roses in Santa Fe.  And there it was . . . Sharon’s poem, my poem.  Typed beautifully, signed in blue, glued to a paper border the color of wet adobe.  

Sharon was the real deal.  She wrote on an old typewriter spontaneously, without revision.  She detested titles, capitalization, punctuation.  She wrote not to be read, admired, criticized, but to breathe.  To live.  In the process teaching others to live.

Tonight, a thousand crickets from the patio - the sound of Earth buzzing.  The ticking of Earth’s time.  Cottonwood leaves chattering in the breeze, way up high, before the moonglow.  I can hear it too, the moonglow, its pale vibration.  A deer bounds up the far bank of the creek just off this patio, popping through a hole in a red cedar into the black.    

I thought about naming this creek, but that’s a problem.  My western mind ordering its space.  Laying claim.  An acquisition.  Preposterous!  This is not my creek but rather the deer’s creek.  The beautifully terrifying copperhead snake’s creek I saw yesterday.    

Tonight, I have no who.  I am a good bird.  Sharon was like that too, a songbird in an olive tree.  Fighting her war so there could be peace. 

I learned recently that she died of cancer.  Fallen bird. 

6/17/18
Shawnee, Oklahoma

DEAR SHARON

You published one book in ‘74
but then again what really matters

are the hundreds perhaps thousands
of your beautifully typed poems
tucked away in the places poetry lives. 

Folded as a bookmark in One Hundred

Years of Solitude on its seventh read. 

Pinned to the Frigidaire beneath travel
magnet kitsch and dangling coupons. 
Concealed behind an aquarelle in an old
picture frame, waiting for the courage to
reappear. 

You once wrote that you are more real               

than the centuries of space between a

bird’s wings.  I guess what I’m trying to
say is you are dead but will never really die.