7 p.m., UW campus, getting off work & On holding a baby swallow in the palm of my hand
ByAnnabel Jankovic
7 p.m., UW campus, getting off work
After hourers and the tall clatter of Red Square
many thousands of miles from the real thing
where I walked with my father on white nights
Reborn in wet brick
the same moon
The same one, he says,
when each we peer,
with cracking hands or simple winter sadnesses,
from the vantage of our respective time and country,
into its clockface
we look on one another.
On holding a baby swallow in the palm of my hand
Thirteen grams:
Perhaps all you would have amounted to when you fell from your world of grasses and feathers
Worms and insects
Into the palm of my unsure hand
You:
Opened your mouth mechanically, instinctually, ready for life and living
Chittered and tweeted in the sky-blue blue basket we laid you in, the closest thing we had to a nest
While we marveled at the God-given geometry of your wings, so nearly ready for flying
that we put you back on the roof, where your parents would see you
Where your grandma-bird and grandpa-bird had lived out the parabolas of their lives
Under the single slanting eave of the house we were both born in
Where you twittered all night, below your family
Into the dark and then the heat of the next day, growing more silent each hour
Until, at last, we brought you back
Unable to bear your waiting.
So we tried to feed you, there at the kitchen counter
On the woodblock where thirty seasons of blackberries have seeped into the grain
A blueberry,
Then just its pulp,
Then just water,
Constantly having to readjust our scale for size
Not knowing how notoriously difficult it is to feed swallows
And when I held your perfect body in the alcove of my hand, you recognized its warmth
And didn’t want to be put down
But I put you in the cat carrier where you looked out at me with hungry, descriptive eyes
With an inherited love of life
Because living was much dearer
And belonged more fully to you
Just a few days old
Made of mountains, rain,
Brushed with seasons
We buried you in simple ground, under an orthodox cross and single, fragrant rose
And as we walked back to the house my father said,
The first thing you do when you return from a graveyard is wash your hands
And I worry that you didn’t know,
Couldn’t know,
In leaving the earth that should have been yours,
That someone here would miss you very much
Would struggle to stay above the outsized ripple of your departure
Would carry the small weight of your body into the years
Would trade places
To see you inherit everything
Annabel Jankovic is an administrative assistant at the University of Washington Press, copy editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and former nonfiction editor of the Portland, OR-based Northwest Review. She lives in dreams in the Pacific Northwest and believes 'all sorrows are less with bread.'