“I do not know the name of this bird.”
--Mary Oliver
It bursts out of the snowy tree,
an explosion of white:
downy feathers fluttering
gently among the flurries,
the sound a pillowed blow.
It makes no cry, nor does
the object of its attack.
A surprise of sudden flight,
a wing-curve close to your face
and soaring away, beyond
the muffled roadway,
the ghostly telephone wires,
into the thick gray sky.
There. Gone. Only a memory,
registering after the fact—
save for the tiny red droplets
even now slowly drifting over.
Anne Britting Oleson has been published widely in North America, Europe and Asia. She earned her MFA at the Stonecoast program of USM. She has published two chapbooks, The Church of St. Materiana (2007) and The Beauty of It (2010). A third, Planes and Trains and Automobiles, is forthcoming from Portent Press (UK) in 2015.