Compensation

The black birch was dying from the top down,

so many branches having already been removed

for safety that the goldfinches no longer came

in the fall to hang upside down and harvest seeds.

Still, the sparrows went to work on a hole in the tree,

gradually widening it to nest size, and I watched

several sets of hatchlings, all bald heads and gaping

beaks, at first, then perching for a week or two

like puffy dauphins on the fence, and then gone.

One year the chickadees were first to the hole,

defending it, making it more spacious still. Other

bird couples came and went, each doing a bit

of remodeling, as you do, upgrading to stainless

steel appliances, maybe, or marble tile. It was as if

they couldn’t help picking away at it, like your old

aunt who knits as obsessively as she once smoked,

filling whole rooms with afghans, slippers, hats.

Each tenant planed away at the walls, until one day

they punched clean through cambium laths

and drywall bark, leaving the home open to wind

now that would chill the eggs. The nest lay vacant

for years, the hole like a periscope eye in the stump,

until one summer when wasp masons began

bricking up the walls, mixing saliva into stucco,

subdividing, leasing studio apartments, a vibrant

compensatory hum for the slowing xylem and phloem.

Published in Broad Street, 2019