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Column 678

Bird

Intro by Ted Kooser
03.18.2018

With Dori­anne Laux I’ve shared the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing a bird enraged at her reflec­tion in a win­dow. Laux lives in North Car­oli­na and this is her third poem to be pub­lished in this col­umn. Are you famil­iar with the archives on our web­site? You can find more than five hun­dred of our week­ly columns post­ed there, indexed by poet or by the title of the poem. Ms. Laux’s most recent col­lec­tion is The Book of Men (W.W. Nor­ton & Co., 2012).

Bird

For days now a red-breasted bird
has been trying to break in.
She tests a low branch, violet blossoms
swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies
straight at my window, beak and breast
held back, claws raking the pane.
Maybe she longs for the tree she sees
reflected in the glass, but I'm only guessing.
I watch until she gives up and swoops off.
I wait for her return, the familiar
click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee
and scan the room, trying to see it new,
through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed.
Books piled in a corner, coats hooked
over chair backs, paper plates, a cup
half-filled with sour milk.
The children are in school. The man is at work.
I'm alone with dead roses in a jam jar.
What do I have that she could want enough
to risk such failure, again and again?
 

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1990 by Dorianne Laux, “Bird,” from Awake, (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 1990). Poem reprinted by permission of Dorianne Laux and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.

Column 679
Column 677