When the bluebird on your shoulder
began to sing, I thought I was nuts.
"At last!" I thought.
"After all these years of pushing myself toward
that threshold!"
Ink has always spoken to me,
but never audibly. But here you were,
your shoulder tweeting,
the feathers visibly ruffling, restless
as my own skin.
It’s only been a month since you died.
I expected some kind of visitation, of course.
I remember how you fell from the tree at eight
and when I laughed,
you told me you’d haunt me if you died. I stopped immediately,
running through the vacant lot back toward the house for help.
It was just a broken arm then — Dad called it a busted wing —
and when at nineteen you got the tattoo on the same shoulder,
we laughed then about that too, but I had a twinge of pain of my own
remembering the promise you made me back then, and how
the arm had stuck out at a crazy angle, with a bump under the bruised skin.
When you finally died, you were twisting on a nylon rope
in Bourassa Park.
It wasn’t the first time you’d made that jump.
This time, you were found too late
by a drunken cop who was out for a late night stumble,
found by someone who should have known
how to call delicately to a family,
how to call a suddenly bereft flock
to the home grove. Instead, we got a harsh phone call
from some crow in blue, asking us to meet him at a hospital —
blue lights everywhere, the scrubs of the staff
echoing the songbird on your shoulder, blue everywhere,
everywhere,
even on the peaks of your lips.
What are you singing, dirty bird?
Aren’t you full of worms by now?
Dad hasn’t spoken much since that night.
He sits at the window and watches the yard, I expect, thinking he’ll soon see you
coming home up the flagstones, tripping over the steps,
leaning your own sodden frame
against the wobbly metal railing. He never got it,
never will, even though there were so many nights
like that in recent years. You never had grace again
after the third inpatient stay; you spent your drunken days in the park
with songs inside you that banged hard on your ribs, stubbed themselves
against the way out
like so many sparrows on cruel glass…
I know that smackdown feeling.
I’ve always known it.
My brother, my bluebird, you are no ghost tonight,
not when your skin can still sing a wince into me.
I understand now:
I’m losing nothing
if I lose my mind over you.
We are two tattooed make-goods,
our father’s vultures.
We sat before filthy windows for too many hours as boys
imagining flight. When first you fell, when first you dangled,
you were as close to that as we could get this side of the Big Window,
and now you’ve broken through before me.
I listen to your skin warbling the answers to everything
I’ve always wanted to know,
and though I’m as sane these days as I’ve ever been,
I’m scared tonight, brother,
of the echoes I can hear
in my own illuminated hide.
hopeful
Dark Matter 