Turning Sixty
BY DONALD PLATT
And what have I to show
for six decades but a few thin, remaindered or out-of-print
volumes of poems? Not one
word wondrous as this barn sparrows’ nest my wife found fallen
from rafters into
the caked mud. It was not stomped into nothing by her horse’s
hammering steel
hooves cantering out, “You can’t, and you can’t!” No, she reined in hard,
jumped down, alighted
in the indoor arena’s raked sand, sawdust, mud, manure and scooped
it up in both palms.
Nest the size of a demitasse. It was clean and empty. She brought it
home. It sits
on a saucer painted a bull’s-eye’s narrowing, concentric circles—
red, white, light blue,
azure, white, yellow, orange, white, azure, white, green—
on our kitchen counter.
Painstakingly, slowly, day by day, two sparrows built it
from dead, dried
grasses, some with tiny seed pods still clinging to them,
a bit of white twine,
straw, and many silver horsehairs. It is almost weightless.
It is spirals so
intricately woven together that gazing into the nest
is like looking down
the throat of a tornado, a still from impossible, daredevil
weather-channel footage
shot by a cameraman in a two-seater Piper Super Cub. Tornado
that took out
two towns and killed three people last night. Channel 5’s morning news
showed piles of toothpicks
that were houses. Winds at two hundred miles per hour, the supercell
passed us by.
We and the bird nest survived. There the sparrows laid their gray
brown-speckled
oval eggs, no wider than a Winged Liberty Head dime, which hatched into
more brown barn sparrows.
The parents fed their nestlings livestock feed—oats, wheat, and corn—
as well as ragweed,
crabgrass, buckwheat, and the occasional caterpillar
or grasshopper.
The nestlings grew feathers. The new fledglings flew.
No need for the nest,
it was abandoned by both parent and offspring. It stayed lodged
in the barn’s rafters until
it fell. I hold it—light, brittle, but still supple—in my left palm,
think of our two
daughters now grown. Lucy who wants to apply to medical schools
and interviewed
yesterday for a job as a scribe in the ER, to follow the doctor
from curtained-off room
to room, to transcribe on a laptop computer case histories,
diagnoses,
plans for surgical procedures, meds, postop follow-up. And Eleanor
who starts her internship
next week on the high-risk obstetrics unit of a hospital
in Geneva, Switzerland,
who will take notes in French, which has become her mother tongue,
who is training to spend
her life helping women give birth to screaming, bloodied infants,
whose new mothers and fathers
will work long years to raise them into men and women who will go into labor
and deliver their own
children . . . It’s dizzying to think this way. All I know is that I’m holding
in one palm
my life. It is tiny. It is so insignificant
and magnificent
that it takes my breath away. It is made of straw, gray grasses, and shining
silver horsehairs.
Blink
BY DONALD PLATT
for C.F.
The morning you committed suicide, Dana and I
were making slow
unhurried love in a beach house with the windows open
so we could hear
across the hummock of the dunes the surf’s continual sighing.
I didn’t learn
of your death until five days later when a friend sent me an e-mail
announcing your
memorial service and including a link to a gallery
of photos and videos.
At the click of a button, you come back to life.
There you are,
in stylish purple-rimmed glasses, hair cut short as a boy’s,
feeding leaves
to a giraffe near the wooden sign that says, “Kenya
Safari Club, Zero
Degrees Latitude.” You giggle while a Sykes’ monkey, with its
white throat like the ruffled
collars in portraits by Dutch masters, balances on your bare arm.
I gulp
when I play the video of you being interviewed by the Kenyan
schoolgirl who asks
you to describe your family. You reply, “When I was in college, my mom
got cancer and . . .
and that was that . . . And so, you know, since then it’s been . . .
I’ve just been on my own
and trying to live the best life that I can live.” Two seconds later
the video ends.
After Dana and I made love the morning you died
at twenty-nine years old,
I washed off sweat and sperm in the outdoor shower.
I keep walking the beach.
Moan after moan, waves hypnotize me. Steady metronome
of rollers sounds
eternity’s diapason. I hear you say again, “I’ve been . . .
trying to live
the best life that I can live.” You did. In another video clip
only ten seconds long,
you joke to your lover, “Sarah, what are you doing? Making a video
of me blinking?” She takes
a close-up of your face grinning from a pillow. It fills the frame.
You’d just woken.
