had i known

the bird i saw at dusk just as i exited the convenience store was the last one of her kind, i would have done something—now the radio is chirping the species obituary, reminiscing the scarlet blooming on her chest & how she swallowed prickled thistles whole, flew with just a few friends, preferring not to darken the sky & how she survived a great spike of avian malaria which killed said friends, only to disappear from her captive area—what does the radio anchor know about her & what does this world know about her & sure i mightn’t have loved her like the scientists with husbandry duties brushing her feathers every twilight did but i stopped—i stopped and gazed at her plump body that’s somehow unscratched among the thicket & isn’t that what people who pay attention and thus, devotion, to this world do: stop and notice carriers of tiny heartbeats?—but can i be one of them, truly, with how i took my eyes off her and rushed off because god forbids, we speak of keeping our graying earth’s cohabiters company as an excuse to be late to the night shift & is there a regret as heavy as never having attended schools of ornithologists—i could have known her name and her sound and how she slept in hollowed-out trees with no soft nape to bury her beak in & if i couldn’t do that i could have opened my palm, come to me, come to me, and maybe she would have come to me and nestled in a matchbox i stuffed with a handkerchief & if i couldn’t do that i could have just stayed, i could have just stayed a little longer and maybe she would have sung & if she had sung i would have rooted myself then and there on the pavement and let the stream of people shove by me—but can i blame her, can i blame her for remaining silent when unlike me, she knew for every person she met that day, it would be the last time & Wren, my wren, the last time i saw you inside the store, was there anything i could have said that would have made you stay?