The Nymph

All critters loved her. We love her still, that woman who’s sharp-tongued

blessings could pierce your heart like the teeth of a half-starved

coyote, relishing the blood of her own self-sacrifice. The unending

devotion of an old woman beaten by incomplete martyrdoms feels

eternal. Even after death, ladybugs bite mourning daughters’ skin and

fly off to circle above the heads of granddaughters who wear their

grandmother’s cold moonstone necklaces, and each parrot-bright ring in

hope of sitting at her feet again someday, holding her gnarled fingers,

imagining together, life as rabbits and Steller’s jays. As new creatures

join the old in the dry grass backyard oasis, she pours out a bowl of feed,

kneels at the fence’s edge, and scolds the squirrels who’ve already

lost half their peanuts buried for winter. I watch her creep towards a

mother doe lying beneath the apple tree, to place a salt lick, and I see a wild

nymph caught in a tiny, broken human body. You don’t expect grand

oaks to ever die. No matter how many snapped branches falls to earth, a

poem like The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry has always

quelled the worst pain. This time her breathing stilled after the last word.

Rest came, and I saw behind my eyes her soul curl and relax atop a

statue of a gray heron standing in my own backyard, a future where I

too scatter food for the critters safeguarded in this almost Eden.

Until we meet her again, us robins and chipmunks shall sit and

visit with her just like we used to. I’ll clean the moss from her

weightless bronze feathers and polish her beak. An unexplainable,

xenial warmth will flutter down to shelter both mother doe and

yearling deer in me. And as she casts down pale blue jewels from her

zenith-perch in the sky, I’ll look up, a wide-eyed bird and sigh.