"The Birds of January"
I’ve shoveled a path through the snow from the sidewalk
to the apple tree, where the bird-feeder hangs.
This path, so I don’t need the big boots every time.
I look at the swath I’ve made and worry that the cat
will also find it more convenient.
Every two days I fill the feeder with a seed mixture.
Every two days it needs to be filled.
It gives me joy to watch them in the tree, busy grey clusters
hopping branch-to-branch.
I marvel at these January birds, wonder how they survive
the minus-38 Celsius nights.
In December, I discovered a sparrow’s breath
is too minute to register in frigid air. I will huff out
great clouds of steam, but sparrows breathe beautifully
silently, invisibly in between the cold and a memory of tomorrow,
and a dream of this moment – with you, squinting at your
computer
on a Friday afternoon.
This morning my radio shovels violence, and death onto
the kitchen floor –
Israel’s had enough – wants Hamas to stop firing rockets.
(Even three-year-olds in playgrounds know that if you
keep kicking someone every day, eventually they will
kick you back.)
A car bomb in Baghdad kills 28.
Pirates take a ship off the African coast.
Another dead Canadian soldier in Afghanistan,
courtesy of a Taliban IED.
A young man is shot to death somewhere in my city –
“drug related,” the police say; “gang related,” they add –
a bloody, tragic mantra of young stupid boys and easy money.
I can’t wait for the safety of the sports news where
hardly anybody dies – teams only win, only lose.
I turn the radio off. This is no way to start a day.
The cat backs away from the door – wants nothing to do
with this temperature. I find her curled
on top of the heat register in the bathroom.
Outside, the sparrows are fluffed against the stunning cold,
perched in the apple tree waiting for a turn at the feeder,
and it begins to snow.