Olivia Rogers
That afternoon had unfolded her haggard wings
and perched upon the crest of a lazy summer sky.
All had seemed placid, like the inside of a small-town chapel
on a weekday. As if nothing had happened. But then,
had anything? Nothing rippled through the windows;
nothing but the bold red brushstroke plumage of a cardinal.
For all but my car, humming softly, and that cardinal,
Time had dripped lethargically on. The berry-dark wings,
bulletlike, screamed through my vision, stained my windows.
My mother once compared the birds to angels drifting through the sky;
this one sliced through the buttery blue expanse of daylight, then
feinted between trees but dared not settle within the wooded chapel.
There was no funeral: no casket, no chapel,
no fruit platters, no black-Sunday-bests, no cardinal
ceremonies of any kind. It was my grandmother, way back then,
who placed her husband’s face in a novelty frame shaped like wings,
and it was he who went quietly off into some untraveled territory in the sky.
He, too, desired to cause no disturbance in anyone’s windows.
But for thirteen years, my grandmother looked on through the windows
of her dilapidated rural home that was once as pure-white as a chapel
each night, in her sentinel way of loving, into their crepuscular skies,
and let her eyes linger, hoping for the crimson mark of heaven: her cardinal,
and took bittersweet solace when it flickered into her yard to rest its wings.
I paid little attention to the perpetual ache she must have borne back then.
I was seven years old, and I wanted to believe she was immortal then,
that all my hushed prayers for her permanence made it past my bedroom windows.
I remember how I blinked and thirteen years later our SUV sped like bird’s wings
hastened by currents of air, past miles of fields and country Baptist chapels,
to hold her 90th birthday like water in our palms. In the frigidity of March, the cardinals,
their flight paths softened in their old age, departed gently, indefinitely, from the sky.
I can’t help but ruminate on the now dulled gnaw in my gut, and I look to the sky,
and I recall how I stifled the wild sting swelling inside every part of me then,
to make my pain more palatable. In the wake of brilliant new cavalries of cardinals,
I stared silently at my mother, a daughter, hoping she’d look through our windows
and feel her own sense of vindication that love after death exists beyond chapels
and that the birds would somehow anchor her on the weight of their frail wings.
It’s a lot to ask, I think, of these cardinals, beating steadfastly through the sky
on red and gray wings, demanding us to see, for them to bear every unspoken relic of Then
on their backs as I still peer wordlessly through windows, naming my throat a chapel.