2 Horatio

Michele Karas
Elegy for a Fallen Grosbeak
In the road
a smear of black and white
and poppy-red.
Has the sky dropped a handkerchief?
How easy it is, I think, to slip
a thing so exquisite from a fixed place
and care so little as not
to retrieve it.
It troubles me
enough to circle back.
When I approach the torn
corner of silk, it does not startle
to reanimate.
Nor, when I kneel to scoop it up,
does the bundle of bone
and feather—no heavier
than a garlic bulb—
cease its cooling in my palm.
The tiny mechanisms
that are his talons
ringlet around an invisible high wire,
inducing vertigo,
and suddenly I too am tumbling
flightless in a hailstorm.
If the earth is a magnet,
so is everything in it—
all of us resisting, and failing to resist, the pull
of each other or something else.
Tell me, what leaves with the Living
when the Living change form?
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