The First Poem I Write After My Father Dies

Because my father is dead
in the darkness I hear birds.
Not the willowy chirps of sparrows,
not the clear insistence of cardinals.
Instead, I hear him, some de-feathered pulp
wailing under the rainy Connecticut skies,
some scrap dragged splintery and
gasping through its last night on earth.
Tomorrow will hold nothing
but a shatter of feathers,
a wet peony, scattered thorns
in the dawn’s soggy grass.

Or maybe he never figured as prey
rather the owl
hunting from the sharp perch of a fractured pine,
or the swift grasp of the Cooper’s Hawk
broken chested but still barreling
after starlings.

In how many of my poems can his body crash
against a summer grass?
My mother holding a flashlight to his eyes, his mouth,
only a yellow light between them,
the vacancy that comes with such a sash of stars,
the ants marching fat and black into the ground.

Before, if I heard birds in the night
I never dreamed they could be harbingers
of disintegration, or my father’s voice
calling back
there isn’t a bird in the night who is also a man
there isn’t a soul that climbs inside a dark sky
and falls down a winged thing.