Island Birds

Come twilight, come the hue of shadows,
she’s there on the wire just beyond our deck.
She’s watching, you tell me, she knows we’re back.
We’ve come for two weeks to write, and rewrite . . .
But now she coos. Makes that lowing sound
her kind is known for. Sometimes she stays quiet.
Small red eyes, dust-yellow ring around each,
pale rust of her shoulders. Scaly-necked dove.
There’s nothing reptilian about her but her name. 

—And not to be confused with the bigger anis
with their black-ridged bills, mostly back in the trees.
Or the quick arrow-shot bananaquit, its
high overtones of song, as it skips tree to
bush to beyond the brown curve of the bay.
And not of course the incessant, exploratory,
omnipresent thrashers. Pearly-eyed, says our book.
One’s prone to hopping along the handrail, staring in
where we sit with our grievances and pet names.

—But now the white smudge of a shower.
Far clouds. A hammering in the hills above.
But that scent. Is it more hibiscus than lime?
What are we to do with a world so lovely?
You want a name for our trouble, too.
I’m better with birds, and that’s my trouble.
Yours is to ask me again. What shall we 
call the troubling thing we share? Give me a name.
—This world flown into the hands of our kind.