Blue Jay

Clare Banks

His poem printed with a Walter Inglis Anderson bluejay hangs on your son’s bedroom wall. That you measured the distance between door and window, pounded a nail into the plaster, and leveled the angle of the frame, that you allow it to remain there at all, quietly, a bird on a branch, a blue crest against cream paint, like feathers through the palest of leaves, is a kind of forgiveness. You might read it at night when your boy is sleeping, his light wings folded under his sheet, you might return to the indecipherable word. Flutter? No: feather or fault. Your father’s tilted capitals blurred, crowded, his hand beginning to rush, his poem at the end in flight.

Vesperal Shiver Sève Favre