Response to Golden Bird, a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi
Snowy egret with boisterous feet
fishes in the shallows each sunset.
It doesn’t know me but I know
it’s mating plumage is veil-like in the wind,
it’s orange feet on black stilt legs
attract fish, my knowledge unimportant
before this sea, this burnished air,
before the small pertinacious bird,
it’s gold-brushed head attacked by fat gulls
whenever it catches something.
At age seven I walked into a classroom
seeing a nun for the first time,
she, opposite of egret, clothed more
in black than white, but also focused,
her slightly bent head listening
it seemed to her own music.
That’s what I will do I thought
and did and have.
The egret facing me is a keyhole
reminding me of Brancusi’s Golden Bird,
thin as my husband’s legs as he runs
past me on the boardwalk heading west.
Come back, come back I want to call
return like the egret to the rookery,
the wild mustard to the mountains,
but he must run the way the egret’s
made to hunt, the way my mind
elides them both.
