The Slate Grey Junco
By Barbara Crooker
with his immaculate bib, sooty jacket,
bobs in the snow for sunflower seeds.
Caught between two needs, hunger and shelter,
he keeps coming back, even as the arctic wind
which has howled all day shuttles him
like the cock in a badminton game,
wind that rattles the windows, shakes the house,
and blows the snow in great sheets across the yard.
But here he is again, charcoal wings beating hard,
as he skids off the barbecue lid, comes in for another
landing. What comes back? Memory and desire,
my grandmother, long gone, the empty rooms
in my parents’ house, voices of friends
beyond the reach of wires, white thread in a bobbin,
a chain of stitching, the line of waves along the shore.
Fugue and variations, the wind’s refrain.
Snow, folding back on itself, warping
and woofing the scarf of the storm.
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Tuesday was even warmer than Monday, nearly 70 degrees, and we had birds singing outside the open windows all day. The daffodils and crocuses are recovering from being under snow and there are even hydrangeas on my cul-de-sac! Otherwise my day involved a bunch of work, followed by Voyager's let's-kill-off-the-female-characters "Before and After" (bleh) with my friends (yay).
Then we watched The Gilded Age, in which two things I always knew were going to happen in fact happened, and made me wonder why, apart from Carrie Coon, I am still watching at all. We watched an episode of Last Tango in Halifax too, in which people continue to make infuriatingly bad decisions! We had lots of visitors last weekend in the snow, so I took pictures of several of them:
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