VALERIE WOHLFELD
The Brown Thrasher's Song
In a patch of elm and willow, branches gathered me up
and my fist fell into an oriole's nest fragrant with grapevine.
Below, my mother sat in the house drinking her special potion.
Steeped cinnamon, milfoil and raspberry leaves.
Moving slower and slower, summer into autumn.
A woman came
to
our house, reading my mother's hands:
wavy furrows on the palms that combed, bathed me
sometimes hurriedly, sometimes with endless care,
I not knowing motives behind their conflicting caprices.
Hands' tergiversations which were my moody caretakers:
scattered prints, clawed tracks under wave on sand
inscribed by plovers and terns. The divinator said,
"In the brown thrasher's song, pauses are a sweet note
between the other notes." My mother drove south
to pick fresh raspberry leaves for the watery tea.
The brown thrasher's speckled egg held articulated calligraphy,
as did the oriole's striated ones. In her purse, my mother
carried a string of pearls whose shine was painted on .
She didn't wear them, but caressed each bead when nervous.
The child tapped, hard little egg tooth, inside my mother.
Beads curled in my mother's hands, wearing off the glaze.
She drove and clacked her pearls, the child lost
among littered seeds and leaves of fresh-picked raspberry.
Deep in trees, I wondered if death was a bird
whispering to the ear of the newly dead,
"You may fall now, my nest opens below you."
Would the bird fasten itself
to
my own ear,
with rush of beating, with feathered cloak trailing,
with shiny dark eye and say,
"Come rummage through my twisted nest"?
