Ornithology

Brandon Shane

A dream lived on a beak, my father

would point at birds and say; finch, crossbill,

cardinal, hawk, sparrow, each confident as

the last and he had no doubts. My palm

supporting the weight of his cheek, I recited

The Oven-Bird by Frost

as he laid still on his gurney,

birds are never about birds,

the cancer climbing to his throat

from his lungs,

and descending to his prostate

from his lungs,

crawling into his brain

from his lungs, scattering memories

like ashes of a loved one

where they have never been.

“They made us memorize his poems,”

he offers to recite The Road Not Taken,

I give him a tape recorder for anything

he would like to say in the future,

having folded my tact into an origami boat,

him staring at the clock as if

there was anywhere else,

as if I could lick the acid washed voice box

of an aged singer and it would soften.

In the space between blue birds

painted on the dry-eyed walls

there was a young woman

breaking up with her bum boyfriend;

a geriatric lying beside a gas pump, he asks

when everyone else is coming,

I tell him, I don’t know how death works,

and leaning against the plastic table,

thought of the poem to be written,

him asking if he was a good father.

I say he was the best.

And I couldn’t make out the words

he mumbled before his first seizure,

six to come, later that night I slept

into the chest of my father, where

he pointed at the birds and got

every one right.

BRANDON SHANE is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.