Felice Beato, Woman in Winter Dress, 1866-1867
Hand-Colored Albumen Silver Print, 26.5 x 20.2 cm
Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
I slept with my head in the corner,
above the shrub where the blackbird settled,
the rooks slowly kiting into the oaks,
summer dusk silting up like the river,
or autumn slits distilling into frost,
leaves alert to the first tinge of snow;
I felt her burred brown ruff, heard her decoy
like a fling of heat away from her bed,
her fluff underlipped by a cut of wind,
then the seamless nuzzle-in, gloved in hush,
the feathers easing like leaves, her presence
in me as light as her weight on the twig;
yet tensioned, ready, springy as a frog
—at a twinge, a pink pad, a prowl of shadow—
to cut loose, fling that shudder-stun, scatter-chaff call,
to undercut in a rush from the core,
a curve of light under the wing of the night
like a blade slashing a sucker off the rock.
Lying there, thinking seemed like a forest
shrinking back to the shrub, impressing my sense of her,
her last glance not the focus, but a beak
pulling a thread of thought into the oblique flight
that unraveled me, unmatted the gap
through which I fell leafily into sleep,
into the world before it dawned that was her call
already in the morning, the chop-chop
brush-and-scrub-up routine, an asperging
in my brain like rain shaken from bushes,
which freshened the sense of some day waking
to sun like her eyes startlingly risen,
the warm dark, like a memory, torn apart.