Seeing things

Hummingbirds

Days before the wedding in the old barn

As its nature was swept out and relined with linen,

The father of the bride found the dead hummingbird.

It had flown in through the large sliding door or an unglassed window,

Or a larger crack between boards

And it hadn’t flown out:

Perhaps it had met one of the glassed windows in desperation.

Perhaps, as they say, it needed nectar and there was none,

Its race car metabolism demanding and disappointed: dying.

Someone asked Jamie why he’d not kept the dead hummingbird

To show the kids; the kids would have found it interesting, they’d said.

Jamie said yeah, but.

The wedding became: The day burst forth sweaty and beautiful and

The groom revelled in saying my wife and all the narratives merged

In the barn before they splintered again and late late in the

Night the guests well lubricated bounced on the old floor and tested the timbers

And the timbers held and in all their like and lust and love and anger and

arguments and forsaken formal wear

In the deluge of all their hearts racing autonomous and together,

Was the blur of one living hummingbird’s wings’ frantic grace.