Katrina Roberts

Coleman Hawkins doing that thing with his sax: high and lonely as a kestrel twirls on thermals, sorting files of sound with a singular finger,now alighting in pools of light, hovering then fixed like whirring wings of the insect glazed in serous amber but dreaming of oxygen: Sound leading a mind into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart. Sound like that, holding and giving out never. Sound quickened with desire. Sound the benefit of nature in taut bolts of time, rich polychrome threads, count: Two-sixty. Sound blots out the violence of affliction bringing it home lonely but good, letting it bend:We had much more reason being winged ones to recollect than forget.

At one friend's home whole arsenals of guns litter the lawn—bright plastic shapes my sons pick their ways between to take proffered popsicles. Later, on evening news, words like "ambush,"  "strike," and "friendly fire" punctuate glowing clips of wreckage in far fields where other mother's children kneel to aim and pray. And though it's clichéd, truth be told, I wish one could keep her boys from growing old and going off to die. Toys need not rush us there. Instinct? No harm? An urge to hoist whatever's there, hard- wired within? Perhaps ignoble, I'm still glad when one spits on his own:They're bad.

Not coop so much as aviary. The way everyone thinks the youngest two are twins despite their differences. This memory of a blue dress the tall man called a cool drink of water. A carpet burning the skin right off my back. What I needed to say versus what I was able —the way you can't see an image in sunlight unless it's matte. Could you drink pee if there were nothing else?

How it must have been for them, when wind came to strike cottonwoods they called home down —silver bridges across a gun-smoke creek-bed, joining yellow meadow to meadow...how it must have been like the beginning of time, when the first one beat great wings (though so silent a field mouse would never even hear before talons sinking in...) and rose over the Blues to find this valley with others following. And their human eyes, forward-gazing in their round faces, they turned toward sound to catch it in feather discs, their hearing tuned beyond human imagining...and then they were gone, like mist dissipating in the lowlands, and an eye trained toward their going might, squinting, distinguish signs of intention written by pinions, stroking damp air in their westward rowing. And we told ourselves all water eventually finds the sea—our coming, their going—so synchronous; this was simply something we wanted, more than knowing, wholly to believe.

The best memory is not so firm as faded ink. —Chinese Proverb The body was one thing we always had in common, even when between us a continent unfolded. Eric says, We scattered his ashes beneath the Japanese maple here behind the house. No ceremony, as you wished, but this... What you wanted from me was complex and simple, both. Once you asked for more than I had to give. I live with this; call it regret. Your hands bloom in the intaglioed scrawl, creased onion skin tattooed with garnet stamps from Pietrasanta, a sifting of marble dust...Images: chiseled jut of jaw, cheek, bridge of nose—recall each granite face rising from New Hampshire dirt upon which faltering, you last stepped. In 1729, long before either of us came to be, Reiner Ottens dragged his fine tip across a smooth sheet:Globi Coelestis in Tabulas Planas Redacti Pars III. Bright beings— lobster, serpent, bison, dove bearing the requisite sprig—swirl and writhe over lines that pin distance and story to time. Spectral creatures that we are, connecting dots to chart our ways....If only I could wrap the whole plane back into its ball. Without your body in it, this world's gone flat. (Jack Marshall, 1932-2009)

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops fast—a warm stone through liquid swimming between us. The stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist of his mouth, like tangled purple boughs or crossed legs of what he never dreamed he'd hit. Years after, I will admit only to so much. Blue moon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second chance? It's what I don't say that speaks loudest.