resolute in privation … Each day, more immobile,
hip not mending, legs swollen; still she carries her grief
with a hard steadiness. Twelve years uncompanioned,
there’s no point longing for what can’t return. This morning,
she tells me, she found a sick robin, hunched in the damp dirt
by the blossoming white azalea. Still there at noon–
she went out in the yard with her 4-pronged metal cane–
it appeared to be dying. Tonight, when she looked again,
the bird had disappeared and in its place, under the bush,
was a tiny egg–“beautiful robin’s-egg blue”–
she carried carefully indoors.“Are you keeping it warm?”
I ask–what am I thinking?– And she: “Gail, I don’t want
a bird, I want a blue egg.”
Gail Mazur’s third book of poetry, The Common, was published in 1995.
