David Dodd Lee ~ Fledglings

There was calm inside the skulls of the col­lect­ed birds. But Jesse still felt a tidal wave of some­thing close to pan­ic, a wave in the dis­tance, a shad­ow over ice. Inside the garage the jumper cables still sagged under the upraised hood of the car. Spider webs and the spent silk of explod­ed cocoons. Sometimes he shook a bird’s skull and lis­tened: noth­ing but time inside. Other flat­ter birds he’d stacked on a pal­let. They’d squawked when they’d made con­tact with his car going 80 (back when he could dri­ve the car and go 80) sucked absolute­ly bone­less by the radi­a­tor. Still, their feath­ers were shinier than oil all these years later—reflective as water escaped into an aban­doned school’s base­ment, snowflakes hiss­ing in through a long-bro­ken win­dow. The oily depths, he named such lus­ter, the lucent blind­ness, a cul-de-sac of vane and quill, the shim­mer of wind across an inhos­pitable land­scape; flood­wa­ters rag­ing under ice, flames danc­ing back and forth on top of a frozen inland ocean, no rea­son Jesse could fig­ure out as to why such a thing would ever subside …

~

Jesse’s moth­er was laid out flat on her bed, on top of the bed­spread. Eileen was very much alive. Her breath­ing could be heard through a small pipe embed­ded in the roof, where crows some­times perched, lis­ten­ing to it. The tem­per­a­ture in the house was always 43°. She remem­bered him when he was thir­teen. How he’d closed his eyes in the field, float­ing away atop the snow drifts, over the creek where it split into branch­es behind him, where he breached the bi-fur­cat­ed reflec­tion of the moon that lay beneath him …

~

Eileen was tired. She was always tired. Eileen did not feel hap­py. Eileen did not feel sad. Like an unframed pic­ture thumb­tacked to a wall. But once a day she maneu­vered through the house, roam­ing the halls with­out dif­fi­cul­ty, with­out delight. She didn’t need or want all these extra rooms any longer. He wasn’t in any of the cold beds. He wasn’t in the chair beside the radio. He wasn’t in the cas­ket beside his father’s in the library. Some of the spig­ots in the house worked. Some of them didn’t. One spit flames. One fun­neled only tor­rents of what appeared to be bone dust. Sometimes a skin­ny spi­der crawled out of a spig­ot and scaled a pipe. She’d nev­er see it again.

~

His shoul­ders were even wider than his father’s. His neck mus­cled straight up into his skull. She moved through the hall­way, dis­turb­ing piles of bee­tle shell plates in her wake. Jesse opened the two white cel­lar doors that led out­side and stood in the win­ter sun­shine. His breath steamed into the air. He felt as if all he had to do was lift one foot and he’d start mov­ing with incred­i­ble speed. He held tight­ly to the rope. He knew he could make it all the way across. All he had to do was decide. A few remain­ing birds had been peeled from the grill of the GTO’s radi­a­tor. He’d rolled them up with the oth­ers, secured them with twine, and gen­tly pressed them into large Band-Aid cans. He threw the dried skulls into a burlap sack. He wasn’t going any­where with­out them. The sun dis­ap­peared behind a wall of smoke. He leaped onto the sheet of ice.

~

Eileen heard only the wind blow­ing across the acreage. She remem­bered the long rolling hill down into the valley—the mar­ket, the tan­nery, the knife sharpener’s A‑frame. She decid­ed to sur­vey the neigh­bor­hood after all. She want­ed to feel flab­ber­gast­ed one last time. She float­ed across the filthy kitchen floor and then hov­ered before the win­dow. She often for­got there were no longer any build­ings left after a weekend’s worth of nap­ping. She looked out across the sol­id, flat sheet of ice extend­ing out toward the hori­zon. And there he was, her own flesh and blood, rap­pelling toward the forests of flames.

~

David Dodd Lee is the author of ten books of poet­ry, as well as a forth­com­ing book of col­lages, era­sure poems, and orig­i­nal poems, enti­tled Unlucky Animals.