The Sound of Opening a Fist

The Sound of Opening a Fist

And now this

other parallel…

the troubled lives

all calling for the one…

unspoken wish

to be held

and made one

                             David Whyte

                             New Year Prayer

After all this time I’m just now seeing it considering

it: how can one receive a gift with a fist

of a heart with the knuckles up and out

and the thumb closed over the curled bird

of the hand always ready to be (or if not

ready, anticipating) flushed out by the dogs

who stand and point and their one paw

raised off the ground the way they were trained

to do.  My father kept bird dogs but he never

ran them, and he kept rabbit dogs but he never

ran them either.  And I think of all the ducks

some guys shoot dead that fall into the pond

how they send the red or black retriever

into the cold winter water.  Or all the indigo-

ring necks of the pheasants hunched under

the brush and the hound that waits and waits

or the beagle who comes back to the hutch

and the two kept rabbits and once the unrun

in him is off his chain he makes straight for them.,

curled as they were behind the flimsy chicken-

wire hutch.  They cried like newborns

and then, when he was done and had enough

of shaking them dead, he ran to the mouth

of the old logging road and was gone

for days and days and days a perpetual bullet

even the police called about, sighting him after

he’d been with a pack of other loose dogs running

deer.   When he was caught again and then got loose

and shook all those chickens to death that one

Christmas morning my father’d had enough

and when he came in the house after

shooting the dog we were expected to carry on

playing with our new toys.  And it’s now

I appreciate I got a plush Snoopy who clutched

his Woodstock bird in a long Velcro-closing hug

and after that morning I took them everywhere

and sniffed them and sometimes took the bird

out of the dog’s arms just for a moment and put

my own fist in there and opened it but only there

safe inside the white benign paws of a toy

and only then in the dark and only then when

the bird I held in my other hand was close enough,

was still but not trembling in the thick brush,

would join us.