Robin's Lament

It wasn’t just the empty nest
matted with feathery gauze, absent wingtips
and now all that extra time to shop for myself -
wormy ends, grubby bargains, an insect uncircumspect.

Or living all those sweet springtime weeks
confined atop a muted family of encased me,
your ovals of such sky-ey paleness that
I was afraid to shift and maybe crack your solitude
and deny you the glory of emergence.

And knowing that your warmth was mine,
I could cover you with the gray-rust softness of me
all during the too-much, too-little-rain and
lonely waiting for fog or night or hunger’s darkness
to wander away and pardon my doubt.

And I really didn’t mind the mid-air cockfights
with shameless hawks filching every aerie
from corner pin oak to sugar-maples by the pond.
Was that really me with shrieks of aerial daring?

And what joy to rain your open-faced importunes
of me, me, me and me again with meaty shreds
unchoked back and forth into your life-full swells.

And it wasn’t knowing that one of you -
slow to stretch, silent cornered, bandy shaped,
wouldn’t reach wings-out and engage the sky with wandering.

No, it would be mine to judge and scythe you
from this terrible height and watch your cutting
fall with a helpless forgiving to the rugged soil.

And even then, in your unprotection, naked below,
there survived a surge of life-promise waxing up and up
and stifled a little this wound now in my heart.