Arrangements

Arrangements

Are you holding

the universe?  You hold

onto my smallness.  How do you grasp it,

how does it not

slip away?

                                Denise Levertov               

                                The Beginning of Wisdom

Today I set to arranging

the loon feathers my daughter and I found

above the pond on the banks

in the last ice-out. It’s been

an absurd winter: today

they say by the close of it and into

dark we’ll feel snow again

but lately there’s been so much

rain it’s taken the whole winter

down river.  But that last

cold day we were out

in the bitter wind is when she found

the first of the scattered feathers

of a loon, and she chucked rocks

that wouldn’t sink through

the melting and while she pelted

every stone she could at the ice

I gathered enough feathers

to make a presence

of it in my room, calling on her solitude

the way God called out to his

creation and waited for it to

call back.  And he waited and waited.

He’s still

waiting I suppose though this morning

the moon was more obvious in her call

back, her half exposed and unclothed, she made me

think of a breast filled

with milk and waiting for a mouth.

I thought maybe I would like to be

that mouth and maybe

be able to restore the loon

to herself, who is now scattered

in a wind she never knew or cared to,

going through life the way loons

do.  Some days maybe I believe

it’s enough to watch all the birds

fly or glide or hide and then

there are days I can’t recognize

a feather for a stone or a breast

for a moon or pond ice, who might, if I could

stretch into the distance, give me

food.  I am too close

to the ground.  And the ice

is going to melt.  And I don’t know

if God (is there a god? a God) looks

out over it all too and aches

the same way, calling out names,

my name, your name, me calling out God’s

name, watching as my breath slips into

the grass that later, in the right time

and right moment will become

a Passamaquoddy basket, small

as the center of my hands, generous

in its opening, overflowing now, an arrangement

with the breast feathers of the loon

the moon I look to when it's cloudy, and
God, turned away, shouldering in
His cold aloneness.