Virginia LeBaron
Death of the Red-Bellied Woodpecker
(after my neighbor told me my feeders were a dangerous distance from the windows, but I ignored him because I liked watching the birds up close)
I watched you for months, happily
swoop in and out of the backyard, cling to the feeder,
pick up a peanut, eat a snack of suet.
Your cherry-red head impossibly glossy.
Sometimes you’d disappear for days, and I’d worry
you weren’t coming back.
The day I found you dead on the deck,
a dreary December morning – both, so still,
all my selfishness turned inside-out.
I had always wanted to graze my fingertips
along the fine slope of your head,
which I imagined must feel like the silkiest of red pillows.
Now that I could have, I only stared,
cried, covered you with a napkin
and buried you under dense Virginia clay,
strange dirt that does not crumble, but clumps
its heaviness against your light body: wrong
putting a bird into the ground: wrong.
Those first few days I fought the urge
to dig up your grave, touch your tufted head
before it rotted away. I wanted the red, savage clay
beneath my fingernails to mark me as I am,
ender of beautiful things.
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Virginia LeBaron is a nurse and a poet. She has published one chapbook (Cardinal Marks, Finishing Line Press, 2021) and her writing has been supported by a residency with the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and through the Lighthouse Poetry Collective. She is an Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of Virginia and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia. www.virginialebaron.com