I was a songbird, one of the kind
whose name I do not know, plain
of plumage but with a melodious,
many-noted song. I was on the deer
bone perch outside the window,
and it seemed I was singing to myself,
inside, that I was watching myself
singing, and that I was hearing
myself singing to the man I was,
as though I were the bird and not the man
I would be when I woke and forgot,
as I always do, and which I did.
Although now I am convinced this is
the true account of myself as a bird
alighted on the perch that is the rib
of a deer, seeming to sing for the man
I would have to be yet again,
when this too would end.

---

Robert Wrigley has published eleven books of poems, including most recently Box (Penguin, 2017), and in the United Kingdom, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). He is a distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho and lives in the woods, near Moscow, Idaho, in the northern Rocky Mountains, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.