Daniel Fitzpatrick

Neighbors

A night heron, juvenile,

lights out from its power line,

starts the crow from the roof peak.

A plastic owl overpeers tomato plants,

browning with this miserable June.

Now the heron’s landed on a phone line

with a background cloud Dalí let slide

from one of his gigantic canvases

in the course of an afternoon like this,

when the heron on the string swings

back and forth at the hips like a toy,

like a man who’s fallen out of a dream

onto a tightrope, unable to wake up.

He’s in his eighty-second year,

the neighbor with tomatoes and a plastic owl

and the cucumber blooms I forgot to mention,

still strong, with muscles slung

from his arms in cords that come taut

when he hangs a potted snake plant from his carport

or grips and shakes his compost barrel

by the handles. 

                            He’s had to order red worms

from a Pennsylvania farmer these three summers.

Before that he’d go home one weekend

West of Lafayette and thrum  

two sticks in the syrup earth

and watch half in horror as they squelched

into the dark above the dark.

Like Isaiah’s bones, he said,

knowing I knew what he meant.

Now he cannot see, and hates to hear

his grandson shriek and watch him stoop

to pluck up nothing after nothing 

from the dead level ground.

He told me this and tipped the barrel toward me.

Down among the coffee grounds, the wilted

leaves of grass, the curls of apple peel 

I watched them worry into view and out—

hundreds of them, thousands, quivering as one,

like the background music of the universe.

See, he said, nothing, and shut it.

Then he left us, and the painted pelican of cedar

slapped between the storm door and the dark.

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel First Make Mad (Wipf & Stock), the poetry collection Yonder in the Sun (En Route), and Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature. He lives in New Orleans and edits Joie de Vivre.