Its coat showy against the snow,
a fox sat unmoving, head cocked
like RCA’s old Jack Russell dog,
looking up at the lowest limb
of a cottonwood, where some pale thing swung.
I stood deep in the brush, off-trail,
so that riverbank tree looked out of place,
its bark largely peeled in dark shards,
trunk gleaming yellow underneath.
The new-fallen powder had muted my steps
and the wind came at me hard,
my scent along with it, away from the fox.
which saw me at last, of course, and bolted.
I meant to lodge in mind forever
that red-on-white display
under that oriole’s nest,
which I saw that I‘d be able to reach,
an intricate basket, deserted since spring.
Recollection came unbidden:
my bachelor great uncle, our patriarch,
by turns benign and fierce,
his eyes the color of steel.
He taught me to know such a nest as a boy,
so that decades later, I recalled a whirr,
a radiant orange and black,
a pale-blue April sky.
That uncle’s penetrating stare–
an obvious warning: Remember this.
I have. The man was flamboyant,
his bouts of temper famous.
I watched him throw a flyrod
into a lake when a bass spat the hook.
He threw me into that very same water,
scornful I couldn’t swim.
I thrashed ashore. Would he have saved me?
Astride his spirited blood horse,
he challenged me to follow
on my aged, hay-belly Shetland pony
as they jumped a ditch so wide
she went down, and I went with her.
My nose kept bleeding until my bedtime.
How could I love such a person? I did.
I remembered a day toward the end.
Grown now, I stood by his hospital bed,
his bright eyes dim, skin pallid as bone.
These many years later, unhooking the nest,
I found three abandoned eggs inside,
one with brown markings, one lilac, one black.
Strangely, the colors were vivid still
but the nest was weather-bleached white.
It dissolved when I tried to hang it back.