Chickadees

Not a Memory Palace,
chambers and anti-chambers
and mnemonic devices,
                                  but a park,
a few tokens marking the place:
stones, plantings, the mix of seeds
someone has spread on a bench.

I guess that's what's meant by living
memory. Her legacy
flaring behind her like a wake.

Engraved on the stone
                           chickadees on a twig:
grey feathers, rough to the touch,
slick obsidian markings,

and so like the models they conjure —
darlings of the backyard set,
that scissor from tree to feeder,
                      or tilt and dip their heads
just like that — it almost
makes me change my mind
about cremation, about having
my ashes scattered in the woods.

back to issue

Rina Ferrarelli's The Bread We Ate, a collection of original poetry, was published in 2012 by Guernica. She has also published two other works of original poetry, Dreamsearch (malafemmina) and Home is Foreign Country (Eadmer), and two bilingual editions of translations, I Saw the Muses (Guernica), and Winter Fragments (Chelsea). She was awarded an NEA and the Italo Calvino Prize. Two of her poems, "The Young Immigrant Writes to a Friend Back Home" and "Mayflies" were Included in WRITTEN ON WATER, Writings about the Allegheny River (Mayapple Press, 2013).