A jar, falling inward

Mother,
your words tickle more
wrists than a shackle.
Rejection spreads lost stature to the fledgling sparrow.
Despair depletes flair, in layers.

Thrust from the nest,
the sparrow’s wilt phases like destiny’s whine.
Each night upon the meadow,
he flits from branch to twig with his virgin wings; breathing in viscous mist.
He expresses his call through syrup,
his voice, wading through the lull of pity
like melancholy upends a jar—
falling inward.

The venom leaks
out of his mother;

a churn of vintage noise
that dirties his notion.

One final cry
and his mother dries his eyes
with sandpaper.

April brings raindrops, aplenty. The sparrow dusts his jacket with these moist apparitions of a cloud’s teardrop;
stargazing with shut eyes;
wings spread
in unfaltering vision. Dripping grit upon paper to collect these unwritten verbs—

but he’s drenched and his parchment is wrinkled

Instead, his spirit collects an assortment of chatter
on the nape of a bell
in menacing swing.

The clang of the bell makes him quiver;
and these shivers flank the loneliest visions:
the surliest dreams
kept at arms reach,
against a wall,
thrust out
and voiceless.

Melancholia paints everything
with a vernacular brush
that has lost its bristles
to the singe of mother’s language.

The sparrow slinks at the crooning of windstorms.
The dandelions shirk.
The sweetgrass eschews.
The fescue, defiled.

As if wind can be persuaded by ruse,
and vanquished.

It is dire out here.
All alone.
Without a mother’s hand.

The sparrow’s feathers are slightly tousled;
flared out in a poise that’s acknowledged.
He shakes at the wind with a thistle.
Bristling as he wards off discordance—
and the drone of the earth in noisome roil

The sparrow is courting an accomplice in conquest;
a friendly hand;
a steadied pace,
but his body is in contraction;
swelling from his core to the weight of a boulder
that has been whittled to bone
at the pace of an arrow
folding air
through a compass.
Like melancholy upends a jar—
falling inward…