Meriwether and the Magpie

Did he know the one as sorrow, the one

he held, gun-shot fallen, its

remarkable long tale . . . beautifully variegated?

For the viewer, fate’s in the numbers legend says:

One magpie for sorrow, two for mirth,

three for a wedding, four for a birth . . .

And wedded in their way they were—Lewis, the bird—

their fragile union finalized with a narrow ring

of yellowish black just at the rim of the bird’s dim eye.

September. Morning. A breeze

through the aspens, fine. (Five for silver, six for gold . . .)

Two centuries still, until language could cup,

in the binary digits of zero and one, all

it could name. And so he cupped the bird,

and framed in script its glossy frame:

the belly is of a beatifull white . . . the wings . . . blackis . . .

party coloured . . . changeable . . . sonetimes presenting as . . .

orange yellow to different exposures of ligt.

Time still, until sorrow’s variegated wing

would bisect the land, would sever from the whole

each singular figure. Here was wonder,

chipped from the western sky, its legs and taloned toes,

black and imbricated, the shifting tint of its shape,

parti-colored, changeable. (Seven for a secret not to be told.)

The wings have nineteen feathers . . . it’s usual food

is flesh . . . beautifull . . . yellow . . . a redish indigo blue . . .

at this season single as the halks.

September, the little rhyme fluttering above him,

dragging in from the far Atlantic its swift, domestic echo.

Did he wonder, then, why the story closed so suddenly?

(Eight for heaven, nine for hell, and ten

for the devil’s own self.) Why abundance alone

could stop the heart’s progression?

Morning. Nine’s beak, eight’s weightless wings.

Then ten, heartless with promise, sets down

on a dipping branch, the click of its digits—

black and imbricated—beginning

the cycle again: the one and then the nothing

from which the one sets forth.