Barometer
How else to measure
the troughs and fronts
of my parents’ deaths
than by the one thing I wanted
when we settled their estate.
I adjust its needle
every time I pass it
in the upstairs hall.
*
Observance
On the drive to bury my father,
the hearse took a wrong turn.
Our hazards pulsed the wet road
at a light interminably red.
At the chapel, I stood in the sun,
worried about a sunburn.
Looking past the glass-eyed chaplain,
I saw, at the base of a giant oak,
a flush of black-staining polypore.
And, beyond that, a man
step off a backhoe and light a smoke.
*
Wings to Fly
Just off a forest path,
I found a wing, no bird attached.
A blackbird’s or a baby crow’s.
I flexed the joint
and spread the feathers,
vanes like rustic pan-pipes
graduated with lengthening reeds.
Whether by a predator or cancer,
by the sea’s mists
or the sun’s scorching rays,
the flight of the innocent’s foiled.
We’re drawn to the extremes
and then we’re maimed,
the way my grandfather was
when he lost a leg.
I saw his gaze aim inward
even as he stared at the world,
and I felt ashamed to be so whole.
Kahlo, when she lost hers, wrote,
“Feet, why do I want them
if I have wings to fly?”
So the maimed appendage their loss.
And all of us want to fly.
Imagining the rest of the bird
flapping in a bloody circle,
I laid the wing on a tuft of moss,
and, for an hour or so,
walked the middle way,
the straight and narrow.
*
Gary J. Whitehead has published four books of poetry, most recently Strange What Rises (Terrapin Books, 2019) and A Glossary of Chickens (Princeton University Press, 2013). His poems have appeared widely, most notably in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Whitehead has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review. He lives in northern New Jersey.
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