The Lost Bird

On the wings of a bird

I would like to think,

I sent word

Flying south

To you.

Seeking connection

No matter the cost, I construe

It is too high

For me to pay

In the end

I often say.

And really,

After I handed

The envelope

Carefully stamped and banded

To a rural postal worker

That beautiful summer morning

The hills stretching on forever here

Like they do

Along the road to Ashfield,

There then

It was tossed into a tan ripped canvas bin

Where it was afterward wheeled into a small

Mail truck even my slight frame could still manage to drive

Down route I-91

To Springfield

Where then it was for sure

Packed into a monstrous machine

And driven

By more than my unrelenting

Dreams of you

My animal sensibilities or physical prehensility

To handle a big wheeler

Driving down the highway

South.

Yes, it was

One of those

Letters which by now I should know better

Unbridled words laid to paper

Herded along by nature

And necessity

Impelled by

A familiar constant

Animal gnawing

As we rumble along

Too often

Impostors

In the cab of life

Never really knowing

Who is doing the driving

Or how we have ended up

Where we are.

Scaring more than me

And maybe you

Thundering along the highway

Sending small mammals scurrying

Away from waiting birds of prey,

Red-tailed hawks along the way

The ones we always see

Sitting in the tree

Lining the path south feathered

Like beggars.

I can only hope and pray

The truck driving my letter to you

Was not the cause

Of the death of even one long-legged

Enormously-eared

White-tailed deer.

Grace most people only dream of,

Long for, never obtain

No matter how much they try.

How many, each day,

Lying sprawled out for all to see

Hoof up on the bright stark pavement for only

A few hours before the bodies

Are quickly and quietly removed

As if in a hush of secrecy

Should the remaining still-feeling children cry.

II.

And so my letter moved onward

Passing through Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport,

New Rochelle and onto the Cross-Bronx

Expressway where soon after

It was unpacked by some city-weary

Postal worker repetitively loading and unloading

Boxes of mail onto some smelly urinated urban cargo dock.

Thank God

You live

Before Manhattan

And those awful tunnels I hate

That make the palms of any rational being sweat sitting in stalled traffic

With twenty-six story buildings on top of crumbling bridges Above blasted caverns stretching down into

The earth below through

Bedrock and tunnels where sandhogs labor with the

Wiry mechanical guts and the covered-up shit

Of the city reside.

Before the oil refineries of the interstate and

The last long-legged

Great Blue Herons,

Wading

In the foul smelling

Muck of the New Jersey meadowlands

Across the Hudson

Alongside crap,

Carp, catfish, turtles, muskrats, egrets

Ancient floating things one does not even want to try to imagine.

Swamp land still by economy, mistake, impossibility

Of anything else coexisting

There in such a mix

A travesty of what once was and

Giving us traveling rural dwellers

A short chance

To catch our breath, slow the beating of our hearts,

As the road continues on

Further south

Past flesh-bound millions living in ticky-tacky houses

All much the same.

III.

As if in another time,

I sent my words on the freeway south

Not engaging pavement, petrol or petroleum

But bound to the body

Of my beloved passenger

Pigeon.

When the bird arrives

The words are yours

But please give my bird some grain,

Cornmeal or the like

Let her spend the night

And in the next daylight

Send her on her way back toward the northern hills,

Where I am

Aging brown eyes

Watching, waiting, a Jew,

The door ajar,

To read what you might have

Tucked under her adorned feathers.