Anna Mark

Oriole's Elegy

I kneel
at your small body despaired of flight and song;
your feet, like fallen twigs, grasp nothing

for want of sky.

Burning linchpin,

in-the-blink-of-an-eye our world hinged open without ceasing—

closes.

Who stole your slender heat from the world's conflation,

blind to the consequences? Was it the window?

Orange flint,

we are yoked to your trajectory, albatross, earth's fevered

demise,

our hunting paradise.

Dear Hazel,

Time has weakened your apparition

and returns you to me, unlearned.

All the roads keep changing;

the cedars I once knew as beacons

have cascaded into the water,

yet, I see past the years— to you.

Spirit, was I just four? I thought

you were my mother when I saw

through you to the 1970s wallpaper,

Mommy? Is that you? You didn't notice me,

or didn't show you noticed me.

Translucent and still, you held a gaze

out the bedroom window, but it was me

who saw the mature chestnut

and the dirt road in the night, and it was me

who saw your hands curled in your apron.

Why did you appear just once?

I looked for you everywhere, waited,

played within your absence, named you,

and called out to you, half in jest.

At the age of four, I named you— Hazel,

the colour of my eyes,

the colour of our eyes.

Anna Mark is a poet on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Her poems are in Canadian Journals, including: Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature and Prairie Fire (both forthcoming), CV2, Spadina Literary Review and Pinhole Poetry. Her work also appears in international anthologies. Anna enjoys being involved in a practice that brings people to an edge, a place of transformation. She watches for those mercurial words in herself, others and the trees!