By guest author Vol Lindsey.
08/20/19
Cardinal
(The color of love)
They had been coming around all summer
punctuating the green canopy of this great white
oak just beyond my second story deck.
He was brilliant as a splash of fire when he
turned his masquerade face to watch her lite
on nearby twigs and limbs. She wore dusky pink
instead of red, a flirt she was, but smart enough
to know seduction was the labor of any man
worth a lifetime singing from the evening
tops of trees.
They seemed to know I loved their play,
flitting into the feeder I made for them while
I sat back to watch. They like safflower, and
cracked corn, but sunflower seeds seem to make
their day. Sometimes he would take kernels
to feed her with sweet birdie kisses and sing
my morning awake with the coffee I used to help
brave the gnats and mosquitos.
Did you know? Cardinals mate for life, happy
to raise squeeky babies in their high-rise
apartments. Their story was a novel I watched
unfold from spring flowers through a humid July
and into the blaze of August.
This morning I went outside to see what the new day
had brought, and there she was, a little mound
of feathers, rustling gentle in the breeze, her head
resting on a little dais of broken wood at the foot
of a window I had cleaned to invisibility
yesterday afternoon.
In the picture-book of images indelibly printed in the
pages of myself is this new one, poignant and bitter,
and oh, so sweet. But there is something else;
in the off season, cardinals tend to flock together
because so many die in winter. It is there,
in the ice and snow, that love is often born again.
