Postcard from Home + Fledging
Mike Barrett
Postcard from Home
In sepia a tractor
resting in sagebrush and snow,
rusting, resigned to wind.
A foreshortened farmhouse,
windows bereft of glass.
Last, a mountain range.
Among a hundred others
in a Billings second-hand store
a day before my flight.
A place, passing, someone paused
to take a photograph
of what remained of someone else.
Those exquisite peaks, horizons
never reached, abandoned without apology.
All the ways the West has
of giving up, of getting on.
As if a tourist, I pictured myself
working some other field,
seasons going somewhere else.
I took it with me when I left.
Fledging
Sometimes while they slept
we lay awake,
listening to owls
in a cottage where a river,
hesitating at a bend, grew
deeper than their city pool.
Perched on bones of trees,
invisible,
they would call for names,
sing lullabies
of wings:
spread, plunge, strike.
Mornings we cooed them
from their dreams and covers
and set them on breakfast.
Then we sat at the bank
to watch them flailing
goggle-eyed and water-winged.
Trust what you cannot see.
Depend on night to raise day.
We comforted them
with no proof, save bundles
of devourings
on the lawn and once
a squirrel skull
by the porch
half fur, half flayed,
one socket empty,
one swimming in gaze.
Mike Barrett grew up in Montana; studied literature, philosophy, and law at Harvard; and currently lives in Seattle where he works on pro bono projects and poetry. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Poetry Quarterly, Passager (Honorable Mention, 2020 Poetry Contest), Avalon Literary Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Gray’s Sporting Journal.