by Gabriel Welsch
Tableau: robin, tree, snow.
Feather shiver, ice blue cape of sky.
The bird clutches its twig, slabs
of snow sliding groundward
off limbs above. Shake the glitter,
flutter at the cold’s bitter
and you read the news, gray as a bruise,
the world dealt daily a fresh wound,
some insult, some cut or bark, some
comb-over offense or chemical smear,
and the robin, the bird, stalwart,
shakes off winter on its twig.
Trace a finger in the snow of the windshield
and write resilient. Think like the bird.
Or think brute, reflexive, brain the size
of a blunt syllable. Too driven to branch,
too instinctive, all impulse,
frail enough it knows nothing else.
The snow flies and maybe,
maybe it’s just too dumb to move.
Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems: The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, The Death of Flying Things, An Eye Fluent in Gray, and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor. His work has appeared widely, in journals including Ploughshares, Southern Review, THRUSH, Harvard Review, Moon City Review, Lake Effect, Missouri Review, as well as on Verse Daily and in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry.” Welsch lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.