Dore Kiesselbach

Startled from snow-day slumber by a neighbor’s mutt, it banged its buzzard’s head then couldn’t solve the problem of the white pine’s limbs with wings nearly too broad for a planned descent. Somewhere an awkward angel knows whether it was dead before it hit the ground. Any sinner could tell it was dead after— eyes unseen beneath bare and wrinkled lids, feet drawn up almost as high as hands. I loved to watch thistle and millet disappear beneath it in the yard. As snow covers feathers that will still be iridescent in the spring I remember seeing a businessman take a dripping handful of pocket change and throw it down a subway grate beside a homeless man. The coins bounced and clattered, vanishing in the humid dark. The rich man said now you’re having a shitty day too. But it’s not a shitty day and won’t be when I retrieve the bird and walk it— toes curling stiff from a shopping bag— to a houseless scrap of oak savannah birdseed drew it from and dig it into deeper snow so what was hoarded by a man may by the thaw be doled.

“Take me with you” my mother says standing in her nightgown as, home from college, I prepare to leave before dawn. The desolation she must face was once my concern but like a bobber pulled beneath the surface by an inedible fish she vanished into the life he offered her. It stopped occurring to me she might return. “I’ll be back” I say and then I go.