By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Rising Dove, 1934 by Harold Edgerton

Mawwage is what bwings us together.
—The Princess Bride

At five, a clamorous bird
proposed outside our window: 
Will-ya will-ya will-ya, then? 
when a high-pitched vireo
like a shotgun bride
interposed fuck-you fuck-you 
before his liquid goddess
could reply, with a flirty little 
who-me who-me? followed by
something like my mother’s 
tch-tch-tch-ing at my father’s
stories she’d heard a million
times before, nattering
away as if strapped on
currents of confused desire,
but finally speeding up
to an ascendant trill—I do
I do, I do / aspire to—

broken off by our alarm clock’s
insistent beep. Aspire to . . . ?
Aspire to . . . ? Happiness?
Transcendence? Sleep?
I turned it off to hear
not the long-married coo
of doves I often do
upon waking, but the shameless
heart of a bird
quivering in song
that knows itself alone

except for you, afloat
among the highest shelves
of dark and light, singing
and singing the changes through.

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Catherine Stearns is the author of one previous collection of poetry, The Transparency of Skin (New Rivers Press) and has a chapbook forthcoming from Slate Roof Press. Her poems have appeared recently in Southwest Review, Yale Review, and North American Review. She is currently writer-in-residence at The Roxbury Latin School in Boston.