Introduction by Ted Kooser: The first winter my wife and I lived in the country, I brought a wild juniper tree in from our pasture and prepared to decorate it for Christmas. As it began to warm up, it started to smell as if a coyote, in fact a number of coyotes, had stopped to mark it, and it was soon banished to the yard. Jeffrey Harrison, a poet who lives in Massachusetts, had a much better experience with nature.

Nest

It wasn’t until we got the Christmas tree

into the house and up on the stand

that our daughter discovered a small bird’s nest

tucked among its needled branches.

Amazing, that the nest had made it

all the way from Nova Scotia on a truck

mashed together with hundreds of other trees

without being dislodged or crushed.

And now it made the tree feel wilder,

a balsam fir growing in our living room,

as though at any moment a bird might flutter

through the house and return to the nest.

And yet, because we’d brought the tree indoors,

we’d turned the nest into the first ornament.

So we wound the tree with strings of lights,

draped it with strands of red beads,

and added the other ornaments, then dropped
two small brass bells into the nest, like eggs

containing music, and hung a painted goldfinch

from the branch above, as if to keep them warm.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Jeffrey Harrison, whose most recent book of poems is Incomplete Knowledge, Four Way Books, 2006. Reprinted from upstreet, No. 8, June 2012, by permission of Jeffrey Harrison and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Each of the senses has a way of evoking time and place. In this bittersweet poem by Jeffrey Harrison of Massachusetts, birdsong offers reassurance as the speaker copes with loss. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Visitation

Walking past the open window, she is surprised

by the song of the white-throated sparrow

and stops to listen. She has been thinking of

the dead ones she loves--her father who lived

over a century, and her oldest son, suddenly gone

at forty-seven--and she can't help thinking

she has called them back, that they are calling her

in the voices of these birds passing through Ohio

on their spring migration. . . because, after years

of summers in upstate New York, the white-throat

has become something like the family bird.

Her father used to stop whatever he was doing

and point out its clear, whistling song. She hears it

again: "Poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody."

She tries not to think, "Poor Andy," but she

has already thought it, and now she is weeping.

But then she hears another, so clear, it's as if

the bird were in the room with her, or in her head,

telling her that everything will be all right.

She cannot see them from her second-story window--

they are hidden in the new leaves of the old maple,

or behind the white blossoms of the dogwood--

but she stands and listens, knowing they will stay

for only a few days before moving on.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2006 by Jeffrey Harrison. Reprinted from Incomplete Knowledge, Four Way Books, 2006, with permission of the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.