It will live for less than seven years,
but I don’t think it knows we’re all just visiting.
There’s no elsewhere in the way we speak.
That’s not to say we speak with urgency.
It rolls around in a pile of charcoal dust.
Clape, gaffer, harry-wicket, heigh-ho,
its clutch is nowhere we can see,
small hole in a dying tree. It times its flight
to the moment before we reach for cameras,
its bird-while, like its life, is brief.
I used to think it thinks
there are beetles in the metal plate
above the chimney. I learned it only
drums the tin to ward us off.
Cal Freeman is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Hippocampus. His poems have been anthologized in The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear 2016), RESPECT: The Poetry ofDetroit Music (Michigan State University Press 2020), I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems On Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press 2021), What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press Kentucky 2022), and Beyond the Frame (Diode Editions 2023). He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.