Two Poems
Nomenclature
In the side yard of an apartment house,
a length of twine extended from a downspout
to the trunk of sapling, and hung upon it
in the motionless air, an array of lacy
intimate garments, as they are sometimes called
in department stores, and one of them—
some kind of bright red, sequined one-piece—
thrashed while the others hung still.
A bird had got inside and could not escape.
I left my briefcase on the sidewalk
and slipped between a pair of shrubs
and easing as carefully as I could my hand
into an elasticized leg hole noticed the filigreed
open crotch and was momentarily distracted,
before reaching inside and gathering
a panicked and exhausted house sparrow.
I held it a few seconds, and stroked its dull head
and its black throat feathers. A male.
Unfortunately, just after I released it,
the woman whose laundry it was,
such as it was, tapped at the window just above me
and gave the OK-sign and smiled, then flapped
her arms to let me know she’d seen it all,
and still, I think, I blushed before I walked away.
The red bit of lingerie was either a merrywidow,
a camiknicker, or a romper. I am not sure how
one tells them apart, although I’m sure
it wasn’t a babydoll, a peignoir, or a French maid.
The bird book describes the female house sparrow
was “dull brown above and dingy whitish below,”
with a barely there “dull eye-stripe,”
a plumage the male must nevertheless find appealing.
It Was Like This
So abundant around camp, the huckleberries
I spilled in the dust just before breakfast
hardly seemed worth picking up and rinsing,
but I thought I should. But in the time
it took me to fetch from the kitchen box
the colander in which I planned to gather
and wash them clean, a pair of cedar waxwings
lit among them and began to feast, heedless
of the dust, and I made no move to shoo them
but moved off downstream to pick more.
By the time I returned they’d disappeared.
You were beginning to stir in the tent,
and by the time you emerged I had two bowls
of berries on the table, bagels toasted
and eggs scrambled, the coffee perked,
and even, in the vase made from a hollow
bone, plugged at the end with a wine cork,
a spray of vivid Indian Paintbrush awaiting.
We were halfway through when you noticed,
on a bare limb of the pine at the edge of the river,
the waxwings seated side-by-side and watching us,
uttering from time to time their brief
and beautiful song, which the field guide says
is a high-pitched whistle—See! See!—
shortly before you saw in the dust,
just south of where we sat, the mosaic of their tracks
and two last berries they missed or abandoned
when I returned. This is the whole story.
Robert Wrigley is the author of eight collections of poetry, including In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; Reign of Snakes, winner of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Lives of the Animals, winner of the 2004 Poet’s Prize; and, most recently, Beautiful Country. He teaches at the University of Idaho and lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, near Moscow, Idaho.