Openings
I drove past the ballpark today,
its deep green plastic turf with chalk poured in,
its swarming kids, their capped heads like eggs,
its chain-link closure.
But I didn’t see any of it.
My eyes opened to that field
decades ago, our ragged heads, our pumping legs
in its shoulder-high grass.
The smell of heat released by straw.
The wood coop silvered with age, the coiled knots.
Inside, chicken wire undulated off course.
Nest-shelves sloped into manure-dirt,
spines of feathers lay like small bones.
We made up stories of what happened there,
how all the chickens escaped
like bees to a secret hive.
I think of the lives of bees, of how a flower engulfs them.
And how a quirk of memory
kept that day in a waxen cell as it drifted for decades;
how the warm passage of our bodies
imprints on the roil of space and time these slender apertures,
to turn and waken
what we thought was gone.
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Eileen Walsh Duncan’s work recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Swannanoa Review, Pleasure Boat Studio’s zine Lights, Ramblr Online, the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and the city of Shoreline’s Voices in the Forest installation. She received Seattle Review’s Bentley Award, and has been a Pushcart Prize nominee.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 