Eastern Kingbird at Cardinals Game
Eastern Kingbird at Cardinals Game
The flies the so-called tyrant
flycatcher catches
back of home,
his weird drop-flight
not-glide flutter-hover,
his perch the cable
holds up the mesh
behind home plate
so we can sit there safe
and attend to the game
to all its ways of noticing
things, the way
for instance, grid and bird
disappear
at the crack of a bat
the way my friend says
maple sounds the best the
way the kingbird feeds
insouciant, oblivious
to 35,009 (announced)
the way one suddenly notices
the lights are on in the 4th
or wonders what a bird attends to
(there, his non-swoop drop flight)
is it all bugs and territory?
It's hard not to think
of him as the performer
taking a last turn
at the top of the sixth
(though we don't know that yet)
his catch, catch float twirl
rise, as Schumacher doubles
and the pinch hitter, a kid
named Hamilton, bloops
one in so Theriot
can bring them home
past deep dusk
where the bird is gone
to some roost I suppose,
still musing as the game
diminishes into the ninth
where the closer leads with a first-pitch change
like putting the turn at the top of a sonnet.
Brian Cochran notices when things are out of place because it makes him feel at home. He lives and writes a couple of doors down from the former Atkinson-Pankey residence in University City, and has work upcoming in Ninth Letter.
