Grief is a strange bird.

Sometimes it darkens our skies;

others, it gathers in the trees

watching us move about our day,

present but not interfering.

On the worst days, it murmurates,

small hurts becoming one writhing mass

blocking out the sun, looming and shitting

on the windshield of your new car.

Yes, grief is a strange bird indeed.

If hope is the thing with feathers, Emily,

then grief is the molting, self-plucked thing

that taps at the window on a lazy Sunday

or crashes into the glass door during a storm,

scaring the living daylight out of your husband.

Sometimes I go years without seeing it,

my binoculars sitting on the bookshelf, unused,

until I pass under a telephone wire

and the shadow of its wings darken the road

like a single raindrop on a sunny morning.

But then deaths come in threes, loss calls to loss, and

a dozen birds congregate on the wire, at the birdfeeder,

or on the window sill, looking like grim hooded crows

or long-necked and wide-billed monsters, laughing

with long-buried knives gripped in their talons.

Last week, I spoke ill of the dead,

a casual cursing of an old friend

for some teenaged buffoonery, half-uttered

before I thought of his poor parents

finding the body in the morning.

What a strange thing, to outlive a child,

or to outlive a childhood sweetheart,

or to hear from a friend of a friend online

that someone you knew very well is gone

and you never had the chance to say goodbye.

The strange bird clicks like a camera shutter.

It breathes the scent of wetted ashes or leaves.

It dances in the moonlight, an elongated shadow

crossing the lawn and falling at your feet.

Then it takes to the air again until its next visit.

More often now, grief lingers like a strange bird.

It leaves ripples on the glassy pond, rustles the branches,

draws circles overhead, but finally, it grows harder to spot,

becoming camouflaged, a trick of the light —

never quite gone, but no longer tapping at the window.