Hummingbird

by Joe Hodge

My wife and I had returned
from an hour of weed-whacking; my hands
were chafed and scratched
from thorns, and the day was hot, but there were
a thousand weeds lying dead,
and I felt as fulfilled
as that fact would allow.
And when we climbed the stairs to
the house, we found a hummingbird
trapped inside the screen porch.
Its wings moved so rapidly
it looked like a levitating seahorse.
"Oh no, not again!" my wife said.
"Catch it, okay?" And I saw the hummingbird's
beak as if it were a needle,
and I said,
"You want me to catch it?"

"Yes," she said. "Catch it!"
So I went over and looked
at the hummingbird, sized it up,
so to speak,
and exhaled, and exhaled again,
and reached high above my head,
and found, too quickly,
the tiny creature
between my fingers, and I
closed my big hands carefully,
dreadfully, over it,
with more gentleness
than I thought myself able,
measured the frantic flutter
of its wings against my palms
as if it were weight, time,
and need,
and then, in the space of two breaths--
my own--
let the bird go
out of my hands, out of that obtuse
structure of wood and screen, hanging
lanterns and garden chairs, and back
to the great
and welcoming sky,
which it owned.

Joe Hodge has been writing poetry for nearly sixty years. He lives alone in a mountain cabin outside Denver, Colorado, with no cats and no dogs, although he does own an African gray parrot named Lean-on-me, with whom he holds lengthy conversations about parrot angst and parrot philosophy (which, according to Hodge, can be summed up in one word--after another, after another, after another).