It Didn’t Hurt Much

In the underground, there is a carrier pigeon

who works split shifts delivering remembrances

to the topside world. She is recognized in fragments:

the snap of my uncle’s shotgun, the thunderclap

of the ancient oak felled on my father’s lawn.

Sometimes I glimpse her departing in

the lilting melody of a dream. Here, 

she cascades like an accordion

player’s hands closing. She dips and dives

like the bow of a violin, like the notes

of my stomach when I discovered my friend’s 

diagnosis, his spine a taut, plucked string 

as the nurse plugged him into 

the dialysis machine.

“It didn’t hurt much,” he said through

the beep of the heart monitor. 

My nerves crescendoed and my voice 

collapsed. A million keys struck 

the wrong chords in my throat. 

I begged the pigeon to bring him 

the dark, gurgling river of his boyhood, 

the crack of his old axe splitting firewood,

his mother’s voice humming bedtime prayers.

To bring him his father’s crooning laughter

and the wailing bark of dogs. I thought I heard 

her that night as I drifted to sleep, a soft 

wing-flutter against my bedroom window,

the timely rustle of a curtain pulled shut.