The Scattering
The barred hawk lies broken
on the seed hulls at the feeder,
a bit of down stuck to the window pane
where he dared to pass through,
a songbird spared, perhaps,
the small gray permanent residents
nowhere to be seen, frightened, still, by the corpse.
Thirty years ago I cleaned the splattered wall,
rolled up the bloody sheet and stuffed it in the can;
sometimes, still, the rages of my father interrupt my sleep,
his failed paintings propped against the attic rafters
among the drift of flies and now the collapsing boxes
of my daughter's things. His portrait of her childhood,
painted from memory, is a clumsy likeness,
yet there they both are, in the distortion.
Cut off in both directions, isolated by extinction,
I scatter her ashes over the island of the moment,
over the ironweed and goldenrod, over the chorus
of bees circling this field become child.
Apples are falling in the wine-red thorns.
Monarchs are leaving for Mexico. The swallows are gone.
Absence is always a surprise, and none of us is coming back.
copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved
