Willingly

There is a little world in the bird’s mind budding open,

a world made from watching and the sound of the rasp

making things still smaller—the door, the window frame.

Here they speak of a purse with buttons across its flap

that costs a great sum: cold button, sky button, goldenrod

and hurt buttons, suet and sun. Here she reads aloud

a poem about a woman who becomes a fish

for a man, who lies down on her belly to be cooked

on the heat-ridden stones. And this, as the garden figurine falls

willingly into the impatiens. And comes something about a child

but the fluster of it—what rips—subsides. Little world

where squirrels are struck, the bounty now of what’s hidden.

And the cat sends its purr out enlarging to become

the jet that rumbles night high up over the mid-Atlantic states.

This world—the bird’s wide infinite—lived out

one tiny, overseen thought at a time.