Chris Coulson
Birds both in leather
I drove into the Whole Foods parking lot, a black bulge
of weather rolling in over the mountains, Led Zeppelin
turned up loud as I could get it (“When the Levee Breaks”)
and slammed into I thought an empty space
except for a bird sitting in a bush, looking me right in the eye.
She didn’t move, I turned off the music, and the car.
She cocked her head left, then right. I kept quiet.
I got out of the car way more gentle than I usually do,
came around the car door softly; she watched me move.
The bird was propped up on a green-gone-brown limb
and she was not getting ready to fly; trusting me as I got closer,
I don’t know why; this was all making me softer—
the bird watching me, trusting me, I don’t know why.
The granola crowd was glaring, going into the store,
still mad at me for the loud rock and roll; I was melting.
The bulge of weather overhead was about to unload,
the granola shoppers went shopping; I saw that the bird’s back leg
was caught on the strap of an old abandoned purse,
leather rotting, trashed-out, but still holding down her down.
I got low, close, real tender, touched the strap, and just barely,
freeing her leg instantly, I hoped not hurting her, but the bird
—a she or a he bird, either way we were birds of a feather—
went on looking at me, and still she didn’t immediately fly away.
Then she did, she flew, and she was gone.
I lost my train of thought, and the shopping list.
I was thrown and touched by the entire moment,
got back in the car, caught the tail of my leather jacket
on the door, going too fast, forgetting for a second my new soft thing,
then I slid in my Norah Jones CD and drove away from the storm.
Chris Coulson is the rowdy writer of Nothing Normal in Cork, The Midwest Hotel, Go with the Floe, A Bottomless Cup of Midnight Oil, and Red Jumbo. His first children’s (or, in this case, babies’) book—Babies on the Run!—will appear soon, to the delight of rebel babies and sympathetic, subversive adults everywhere. Coulson has been writing his way out of trouble since kindergarten.
