The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elegy with Clouds & by Robin Turner

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Little Bird

for Artie

The hottest month of the hottest year
on record. August in Texas. Unrelenting.

Mother had died just the month before.
My mother. The world kept burning.

And on the news, on our phones, all week the photos
of treasonous men, their arrogant mugshots

marring every screen, suffocating each sensible citizen.
How to breathe through the heat, through the spin

& the grief? How to rescue from harm what one loves?
When a red-feathered bird crashed into our window, it fell

like a stone & lay motionless. Little bird, you said
& stepped out to the porch, bent to stroke, to tap tap her still chest,

brought ice, brought tenderness, prayed mercy.
In the morning you spared me

from shoveling parched earth
& gave up the lost creature to ground.

You knew, knew I would not be able to bury her—
one more once beautiful thing.

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