After Reading Bashō, I Remember the Rain
I found a quail’s nest under sage plants near the house
woven, I think, while we were traveling,
& the yard seemed abandoned.
The hen burst out under a torrent of hose-water
I unknowingly sprayed into the leaves.
Twelve perfect eggs!
Then days later beneath the variegated branches,
only shells. Small, each neatly broken
in half. I spied the button-topped
babies ebbing & flowing after their parents
ranging through neighborhood, slalom-
ing arbor vitae hedges, half-flying to shrubs,
in the waste-water ditch overgrowth, not back
to us. So many eggs someone once told me
because birds are low on the food chain
but that is no comfort. When my mother was dying
in a hospice far away I was told to come quickly.
Bad weather closed airports down the coast
rental cars gone & I slept on a bench in Port Authority
until a train finally delivered me on the day of her death,
brother and father waiting on a rainy platform.
The living go on living; we visit the rooms of the dying,
one after another. My father, my dear old father,
did not survive & like Bashō, he was tired at the end.
Tell me if we return to each other somehow. In bird song? Memory.
We waited for weeks for the quail to come back,
walking softly over the gravel by the nest.