DUMMY NESTS
Did you know
a male wren will pack and unpack
a half-dead fern, flit to a gutted gourd
with sticks and tinsel, stitch
a third nest with trash from the ditch
in the boxwood because work
is love and love is work?
I didn’t know
the female of this species needs
someone who’ll try
again and again to do the work
of happiness though when I watch
her enter and leave, enter and leave,
enter and leave, it’s hard to imagine
she’ll ever be satisfied. I’ve been afraid
of the incubating dark of time
and memory. I watched all summer
while she didn’t choose
a nest for some future clutch. I could
do nothing. Did it ever feel right,
being on Earth? All the work of trying
to make this life something we could abide,
the horsehair plaster hammered down,
the varnish on walnut trim stripped free,
re-stained, the kitchen tile we leveled together,
then laid out like some vast gray sea. How mysterious
to think before we finished things you’d be the one
to leave.
DUMMY NESTS by Jane Ann Fuller | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser Set
Jane Ann (Devol) Fuller’s, HALF-LIFE, (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. A best of the net nominee and winner of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize, Fuller’s poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies. Some include Atticus Review, B O D Y, Calyx, Denver Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, One Art, Shenandoah, Sugar House Review, SWWIM, The American Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, The
MacGuffin, All We Know of Pleasure:Poetic Erotica by Women, and Women of Appalachia Project. Work is forthcoming in Cimarron.
Fuller co-authored Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, published with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
