Do you remember the stream, the tree, the old stone
cottage the two boys came to? Though they sensed
they’d crossed into the land of some shrikish neighbour
who any moment might appear at a high windowsill
redfaced as a vase of roses, they knew that tree
had made itself for climbing. They clambered up
the sunlight’s stammering ladder, reached into hollows
placed there perfect for their reaching, all while
the wind was a seething room which wouldn’t take them
anywhere besides where they were meant, each finger
a slender-boned bird’s tongue, each handhold
a mouth stretched and muttered. They looked down
into a stream muscled with every kind of fish
they could imagine: buckled eels, mudlarked gold
of tench and inchlings nipping, gnawing and conjoining.
They saw the roof tiles spread below like fledglings
preening in the wind, and the cottage window empty still,
and one turned to the other and said, Do you remember?
and trailed off, both unsure of what came next.
There the bough hung heavy as a sow’s belly
with every kind of fruit, though all of it was wasped
and rotted, all would soon tear the tree down with it.
Their hands hurt for holding. Dusk fell as if
out of one such hand. What came to the window then
was a bird, though neither saw whether from the old house
or from the falling sky. On long fingernails it seemed
to sit and sitting sang and the song was full of where
the boys had been before they could remember, a black-
berry kind of place, a singing at the end of thorns,
a yammering clock or childish snowglobe inside which
the cottage opened onto bird and bird sang of cottage
and of the boy who, knowing what the song meant he must do,
hurled his lucky stone to kill it before he lost his footing,
before the stone could take on wings, could build a nest,
could sing the song the bird was singing from the dark
window, before the darkened window was the sky it was.