Gift

Gift

In a nest pleated from flesh

there lived a bird

its wings beat about the heart

we mostly called it: unrest

and sometimes: love

              “Maturity”

                Zibniew Herbert

I know I’ve scanned all this before—I know

her open grass and molasses hole where

when I was small and the worm bait knitted

in my fist I’d stepped up to my calf

and felt the suck of mud close cold against my knee—

And the way I’d had to bully and pull my foot

as if whatever jaw clamped it wanted it more,

and the red-wing blackbird swaying on a stick

of swamp grass or cat-tail I can’t now

remember which, was oblivious.  It’s here I crossed over:

pole and low boots—to the trout pond he’d told

me was on the other side—a secret well

of rainbows.  If I walked on my own he’d said,

he’d said again and again, I’d find my stride and if I walked bare-

foot I’d know the feel of where it all hid:

I’d feel the blood of the water twist under the grass
roots,  I’d feel the Jesus bugs skim and hover above it all

I’d feel that grass and bug breathing, not just

from wind but from some old age, under-the-mud

lung.  I tugged and tugged my boot—it sucked

and sucked and stuck until the sole of my skin lifted

from the rubber and there was air and there was sound

and there was the length of time it took to pull

and pull and it all let go.  And I walked, empty handed,

wormless poleless shoeless, barefoot as birth, the whole rest

of the way toward the gills siphoning silt, and fins
waving away the bottom of things, that, under such water,
always remain soft and somewhat solid.