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.
