thick rough trunk, transitioning to smooth

greenish white, powdery

left my hands, arms, hair, clothes with

poplar family sour musk

rich green leaves, smooth and thick as

bookbinder’s leather

fell, a golden clatter in the autumn

dark canker wounds

where swollen black aphids bred

seeped acrid sap

colored rich brown of linseed oil

when it blew down

(the trunk shattered, a man’s chest high

a mass of debris

limbs and leaves stretching across the yard

outside the kitchen window)

kestrels fledged chicks there from a

confiscated starling nest

whose five blue eggs lay orphaned beneath

a new nest, a mat of grass

mirrored with the kestrel’s own five eggs

freckled and flushed

one drowned in the trough,

an enameled cast-iron tub where red worms

and mosquitoes wriggled

pulling the young bird from the water

puffy eyed, pallid skinned

a macerated lump of feather and flesh

made me witness to indignity

an abbreviation to which I was impotent

another, hissing, wings spread, belly to soil

was caught on the ground

we three boys surrounded it armored

with railroad gloves

scooped its light body, caught wings to breast

looked into its eyes

and could read nothing that was there

but a stone hardness

mediated by leather, each wanted to touch it

hold it like a spring

feel it like a willow limb, a mouse trap

a raised hammer

releasing a bird is an act of subversion

delicate nonchalant gesture

cupped hands raised, opened, gravity is broken

all those that lived, I think came looking for their home

it was gone, sawed into rounds, bark gnawed by horses

and the birds drifted their own directions

on individual trajectories of personal inertia