Eastern Bluebird and a Group of Bleeding Hearts
Sheltering a Chrysalis
When it was finally condemned, locked
between crane jaws and torn open like a doll
house, for a few moments the bedroom wallpaper
was still intact — a pattern of block houses,
dark blue on red, light blue on dark blue,
red on dark blue, a whole
border of home, home, home, like an incantation
against disaster, an assertion
faced with the uncertainty of income and weather —
until the thin strips of light draping the room, dilated
and blinded, suddenly became the whole sky.
Once, in a long December, my daughter messaged
that she was stopping by her father’s empty house
to collect her things, and when I thought of that
unlit brick alone in the fields, the iced roads,
the coyotes no longer hidden in stalks and no longer
feeling a need to hide, I said no, save it for daylight,
and of course she went anyway while I laid in bed,
staring at two watercolors propped against the baseboard,
telling myself the narrowest story, the white screen
in my left eye sparking slowly back to lamplight.
It was after I heard her key turn, the close
and click, that I allowed the feel of my own body
to once more spread outward and fill the room,
and could bear again the imposition of my three
nightly familiars, trailing their graves
of black crepe and re-arranging hours into arias
and cathedrals, until the curtains grayed
and I stepped out of bed, out the front door, climbing
to the top of my new street toward the oncoming
morning, ready to throw myself under its heavy rise
and lift it into the brightening sky.
illustration by Sarah Hasty Williams
Virginia Smith Rice is the author of the poetry collection When I Wake It Will Be Forever, and a poetry chapbook, Whose House, Whose Playroom. Collaborative poems, co-written with Christine Pacyk, are included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.