Beth Copeland - Abandoned Nest

Beth Copeland is the author of three full-length poetry books: Blue Honey, recipient of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize; Transcendental Telemarketer; and Traveling through Glass, recipient of the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. She owns and operates Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a residency for writers.

Abandoned Nest

You hand me a nest, a bowl of pine straw, moss, and leaves with three eggs like speckled jelly beans, hardened, unhatched; we wonder what happened, why the bird left, and laugh about weird locations where wrens build nests—on a grapevine wreath, in the crotch of your jeans on the clothesline.

Later, I look at properties on my laptop, dreaming of a place of my own, a condo in long-leaf pines or a brick church I could convert into a home.

I pack miniature houses in bubblewrap to ship to my daughter and sift through a battered footlocker of old diaries and letters too heavy to lift, deciding

what to keep, discarding the rest. When did we quit trying? When did the life we warmed with our breath turn cold? When was our ending etched in stone?

The Visitor

I step out of myself onto the lawn, away from sumacs with spikes of red, lemon-scented berries, from fallen trees rotting under a canopy of poplar leaves,

from milk caps and amanitas poking through moss, their white, fleshy heads heavenly or deadly, from the water oak and sugar maple grove.

My fawn shadows me onto gravel, stepping cautiously as if on first snow. We graze on purple heal-all, purslane, bitter dandelion and wild violets. When I raise my head, a woman speaks to me through the screen door, a silhouette of stillness. Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.

You’re welcome here. But who is she to invite me, as if I’m the visitor, when she’s the guest? These woods belong to my spotted fawn and me.

Apiary

Cultivate balm and humility. Forage in fields of milkweed, lavender, and sage. Dive-bomb dandelion suns. Carry pollen to the humming hive. Fan flames with your wings. Don’t envy the odalisque sleeping on white satin, her torso elongated and small-waisted. Move with millions en masse toward one goal—gold in the hexagonal honeycomb.

Measure the angle from tree to hive. Dance to show others the way home.

Buddha, Buzzed

The fly wants to get out, bumping into the glass but unable to pass through the pane to pines, to green poplar leaves, palmetto grass, and fetid trash where a fly might feast. Zooming to the lamp, it perches on the burlap shade, then nosedives into the lightbulb as if it’s the sun. What would Buddha say to the fly? That glass is an illusion? That life is suffering? That if it meditates on the windowsill long enough it will pass from this transient path to a higher plane of existence? I’ve shooed many a fly from the face of a sleeping child, but how do I know if it paused there to do harm or to whisper a blessing into the baby’s ear? Tomorrow I’ll find a dead fly on the sill, its metallic blue thorax like a miniature shield. I’ll pick it up with a tissue and throw it into the trash, relieved I didn’t have to swat it and bear the burden of its death, that it bludgeoned itself against the glass and passed from this dimension of blood and breath onto the land of enlightenment or samsara, only to return as a cobra or cat or someone like me who ponders these questions without knowing that I’m pushing against an invisible barrier, frustrated, wringing my hands, eyes glued to a world that lies beyond my grasp, trying to pass through this fence of flesh to the other side of the glass.

Peacock in Buddhist temple north Thailand, photograph by Mark Ulyseas.