Page 28 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #7

19
Titmouse Turns
away. He didn’t fly off but turned his back on me to sit still
his mate sitting
their eggs.
This one seems spent,
a pensioner
like me, on his bench,
in his park,
in his morning coat,
all gray, well-worn,
a waistcoat, beige, unbuttoned, white shirt—his brisk
black eye
turns on me
again—black too
his tuft, that cap windblown.
He’s here all
year round though absent for days at a time,
enough to think
him gone, gone,
forever, lost,
though it’s I
who fails to be
on watch when he
drops by. Why he
I find so special?
“De gustibus
aut bene, aut nihil,” Chekhov turned
the phrase, meaning
I could weep
to turn away
from yet another
one down on his luck holding out
at the traffic light,
his cardboard sign, “Anything helps.”
on the limb from which my feeder dangles.
I say he,
but it could be she,
you can’t really tell, but I’ll guess he who looks a bit sad, contemplative, staring out
on my back yard. Or let’s say ours. Now and then
he turns his head to keep an eye on me. I wonder whether he
is ill. They never hang around
but take a single seed to a nearby limb and crack
it open to eat right there. They’ll return
for five or six
in a row, and once one carried, again and again, his one seed burden to
a farther tree
and kept coming back for more. Feeding
his chicks, perhaps. Or, this early
in the year,
david haMilton