Sanctuary

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Sanctuary
by Dorothy Nielsen
I like to keep this bird magnet near –
the one I didn’t remember to send to my mother
before dementia, the nursing home,
and then a quiet dying interrupted
long years in her own kitchen watching for the cardinal
that this magnet recalls each time I pull my fridge door open.
I would think of my fridge magnet when, one spring, I’d open
your Zoom link to a Covid-era funeral. Near
my study window, my own resident cardinal
was pouring out a heart-rending song for your mother
while miles away, watched by twittering birds it seems you’d interrupted
among the trees, you gently laid her in her final home.
My screen-gallery showed other mourners whose second home,
like mine, was once your mother’s kitchen – always open,
as my mom’s was, to our friends who so often interrupted
their quiet, ousting them, though still we sensed them near-
by playing their patient role of brooding mother,
which only decades later I realized had been a cardinal
rule of theirs. Now you tell me your mom loved it when a cardinal
caroled from the elms behind your home.
Studying my bird magnet today, I picture each mother
listening from her kitchen, window open,
watching for a flash of red as four o’clock draws near,
the hour her private dreams are interrupted.
When at last I was a parent, I saw how daydreams could be interrupted
by another soul. And suddenly my first cardinal
appeared with his seeming frenzy to come so near
that he’d launch himself against the window, as if drawn to this home
I was finally making. To stop him, I’d have to wind the window open
wide on those long days of learning the secrets held by a mother,
such as, first: that something about being “mother”
might have settled the self, yet at the same time interrupted
those enclosed visions girls will spin, eyes half-shut, half-open
during dreamy years before they fly like a reckless cardinal
at reflections of themselves in the windows of somebody’s home,
crashing into a future they’d never dreamt was so near.
Or, second: once a new life has erupted to pry our hearts open,
we will need a resident cardinal for the home,
hovering near, to sing a sanctuary for the mother.