Carolyn Supinka

The Heron

After Elizabeth Bishop

This is the time of year
when the wind combs the trees
with cool, thin fingers to tug
the last leaves loose, like my mother

loosening tangles from the nape
of my neck, and I remember
that negative space exists:
between the shadows of branches,

the mountain’s shoulders. Memory expands
like the ice lacing the pond seeks its limits.
Between the dry bones of fence posts,
empty sky is everywhere.

Once the fog lifts, the fox slips
beneath the bridge, its muddy fur rouged
with blood of the possum lying on the path,
its body opened like a spilled purse.

This morning I stood on the bridge
and the field ahead shuddered
and turned into a flock of geese.
They rose with one mind

in the sky, then scattered,
a gray wave breaking
into a sea, urgently calling
as they spread, to each other

in the same voice.
I wondered what told them
to fly. There had been
no gunshot or blare of traffic

from the highway.
The field was asleep,
unchanged through it all.
It offered no answers.

Its voice was the voice
of a field of grass. I am a field
of grass it said. The fox under
the bridge spoke a dark love

song with its lips of blood.
My thoughts, unbidden, spoke
in my voice, which is also the voice
of my mother. I am your mother

she said. Come home. A heron
remained in the field
and spoke to no one. Its body
was busy in its silence.

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Carolyn Supinka is the author of the chapbook Stray Gods (2016, Finishing Line Press) and is a writer and visual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Pondicherry, India from 2013-2014. Her work was most recently published in The Sonora Review, Arcturus and The Recluse and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM.