I have to go now,
have to leave the end of this continent
and return East, past an entire ocean

I could be here, if I could be there, too.
(and if I can’t be there, can I go to the other there?)

notebooks packed, just so,
neatly folded garments with pockets, sandy now,
later to hold feathers again, with a clear consciousness

I shut the door with a sigh and the words,
they dance as dust in another country,
dry and vast, the blue sky never ending

the words, they settle back in my hair
and on my eyelashes, tired from forgetting
what it was like to write in
the language my father speaks to me

a townsend’s warbler comes,
a gift from the sky and visitor of my dreams
you may have seen him, the warbler,
at the beach the other year,
brow and cheeks yellow, black throated
white sides, streaked with yellow and gray
legs, shiny and black and dainty-toed

and his tiny beak, also black, shaped to catch insects
on his regular days,
which do not occupy him with wordly concerns
his beak touches the words, he can’t help it,
he, the townsend’s warbler, picks them up with soft kisses from my eyelashes
his departure a breath of gold
as his wing touches my cheek, ever so gently

the warbler understands the words that speak of
Heimweh and Sehnsucht and Ursprung
after all, he is a dweller of two worlds
always about to leave, always returning,
never having to choose, as is in his migratory nature

but wait, now that I know that I would call him
Townsendwaldsänger, if I returned East,
past an entire ocean
and back to the language my father speaks to me
maybe I’ll stay in a land, dry and vast,
so that I can think of him as warbler