The Small Birds

They ask us to understand our grief
by simply leaping out, trusting the air
which is far more complex than sorrow, to follow
all we’ve ever done with a pure heart and change ourselves
completely, but never for long.
Someday, you say, you’ll be glass in a window
that looks across a landscape of wilderness and snow
which will melt when you go out there and walk, because
you’ve loved someone well. But whom do you love, 
after all? For now, you open that window 
and lean out. For now you just watch things: vivid rugs 
on hardwood floors, closets full of clothes
that would never fit you, where another person’s smell
lingers for years. And then it vanishes.

Michael Hettich | Mudlark No. 40 (2010)
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