The Slowness of Trees (for my mother).

   i.

   Dawn, inside my flight cage, the cedar waxwing
   gapes for berries. His wings open and close, open

   and close, with the sound of a heavy coat
   dropped behind a door. All of him, perched on

   a cut maple, is smaller than my hand.
   On the ground, the robin has the fear of

   intimacy. He snaps his beak open, Give
   me, give me, while whirling backward into

   a corner where he screeches, Get away, get
   away. He is the spirit of half the men

   from my twenties, but I am kinder now. I
   catch him, stuff pellets of moistened catfood

   down his throat till his eyes soften. He
   flops down, dazed, stretching his throat, an empty

   silk purse I must fill over and over. The Eastern
   kingbird, who soars down from his perch to pick

   a mealworm from my fingers, is ready for
   release. I grasp him, my palm arched around

   his back. Inside a pet carrier, he ruffles his
   white breast and hunches down, one miffed bird.

   ii.

   The man I meet at the Sanctuary has
   seen a family of kingbirds sitting on

   a fence, not a mile away. In the parking
   lot, he tells me about the first bird he

   raised--a bluejay who landed on people's
   heads for two weeks after release,

   flapping its wings and squawking for food.
   "Neighbors were afraid to come out of their

   houses," he says, laughing. "This was twenty-five
   years ago, when I was a kid." We climb into

   his truck, the pet carrier between us, and
   the kingbird stares straight ahead, intent

   as a new driver behind the wheel.

   iii.

   In the reclaimed prairie, the road is
   a scratch mark under grass, clumps

   tufting purple as in Japanese autumn painted
   on gold-leaf screens. Ahead, grasshoppers

   fly up and dip down in long arcs, their
   iridescent wings whirring like small

   springs. The whole world is a green clock
   ticking away. We stop at a line of

   poplars. A kingbird skims a branch,
   waving the white handkerchief of his spread

   tail. He flits out of sight as our doors
   slam. We open the pet carrier on

   the tailgate and wait while my bird, his head
   tilted, thinks about freedom. My guide says

   it takes a long time for trees to invade
   an open field--they must start at the edges and

   gain foothold. I am thinking of the far
   maples and ash slowly walking toward us,

   as if all of us were sleep-walking inside
   the same dream--when my bird, no longer or

   never mine, flies out. Soon, he is in
   the poplar, calling to the others. Twenty

   yards away, one is listening from a fence-post.
   "That's one of the parents. He'll hear your

   bird and come to feed him. Birds don't count well.
   Your guy will do fine." Getting into the truck,

   I think of you letting me go alone into
   a green world you were leaving. I know about

   hoping for best. Twenty-five years have
   gone, the slowness of trees. If I could

   walk through waves of pampas grass and meet you
   in an open field, I would tell you, you were

   wrong, come back. The truck touches the pavement
   again. I look back to the prairie. In five years,

   I'll be older than you were, and the tree
   line will have changed scarcely at all.

Kyoko Mori is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University. Her most recent publication is a book of essays entitled "Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures" (Henry Holt & Co., 1998).3