His little white and grey body
and jaunty black cap
is a common sight at the feeder.
That is his charm
like the sparrows, titmice,
red-headed woodpecker 
that drills my walls,
the cardinal and his wife,
purple finches.

That chickadee dee dee
echoed through Cape summers,
birds crowding grandmother’s 
dining room feeder. 
It woke me in my first solo apartments,
finally, barely, in control
of a destiny I didn’t understand.
It rang out in COVID—
dee dee—a little aural hope
in a silenced world.

Let it startle you 
into certainty of spring.
Let it remind you that love,
no matter how inept,
has been yours, 
and, even now, 
you are not alone.
                        

“…a Gnostic term for the fullness of all that is divine; 
it means the totality of God, who is darkness and silence, 
and only knowable through the aspects of divinity that come 
into the light out of the fecund absence, a ‘space’ that is 
not a space.” What is the Grass, Doty, p. 42

Science says blackholes only devour, 
never give up their dead.
But what if God is a sort
of Gnostic darkness and silence 
that occasionally spits light, 
and into the light, something. 
Us? Hope? A chance to love? 

What is it we yearn for from God,
in whatever form, 
but which is so scarce on earth’s pocked surface,
acned by war, rain, and mines, 
wrinkled by broken macadam
and crossed telephone wires.

Longing fills us—we search all our lives
for replays of youthful ecstasy,
moments we escaped gravity,
bodies lighter than light,
the darkness, like God, a fine, thin bed
beneath our limbs.
                        

demands another frisbee round,
running back and forth across
the frosted grass to fetch
one more spinning throw. 

He tells me when he’s done, 
carrying his red toy to the stone steps
where he balks, unsure his leg, 
even with the tumor gone,
will support him up that tricky climb. 

I am cold in this November wind,
prefer my cozy chair and book,
but won’t deny him 
any pleasures still remaining,
wait with him to climb,
my body one small 
bulwark against the fall.