The Slowness of Trees (for my mother).

• Author: Mori, Kyoko
• Position: Poem

i. Dawn, inside my flight cage, the cedar waxwing gapes for berries. His wings open and close, open and close, with the sound of a heavy coat dropped behind a door. All of him, perched on a cut maple, is smaller than my hand. On the ground, the robin has the fear of intimacy. He snaps his beak open, Give me, give me, while whirling backward into a corner where he screeches, Get away, get away. He is the spirit of half the men from my twenties, but I am kinder now. I catch him, stuff pellets of moistened catfood down his throat till his eyes soften. He flops down, dazed, stretching his throat, an empty silk purse I must fill over and over. The Eastern kingbird, who soars down from his perch to pick a mealworm from my fingers, is ready for release. I grasp him, my palm arched around his back. Inside a pet carrier, he ruffles his white breast and hunches down, one miffed bird. ii. The man I meet at the Sanctuary has seen a family of kingbirds sitting on a fence, not a mile away. In the parking lot, he tells me about the first bird he raised--a bluejay who landed on people's heads for two weeks after release, flapping its wings and squawking for food. "Neighbors were afraid to come out of their houses," he says, laughing. "This was twenty-five years ago, when I was a kid." We climb into his truck, the pet carrier between us, and the kingbird stares straight ahead, intent as a new driver behind the wheel. iii. In the reclaimed prairie, the road is a scratch mark under grass, clumps tufting purple as in Japanese autumn painted on gold-leaf screens. Ahead, grasshoppers fly up and dip down in long arcs, their iridescent wings whirring like small springs...