You could understand him misunderstanding,

digging such careful holes with his shovel,

sifting in spoonfuls of birdseed —

an honest mistake.

And you could half-understand how he stubbornly finished,

how he aimed his back at everyone laughing

and patted the dirt down

gently with his hands.

But to greet each day with his watering can,

to go on as if he were a gardener, as if he believed ...

someone finally stomped all the green in his yard,

and that should’ve been the end of that.

Certainty feels like a flag when you fly it. It snaps in the wind

and makes the sound of your own good name,

of your own high opinion. It’s the opposite of birds.

And it was birds that he was growing, after all:

cardinals, robins, chickadees, starlings.

His seedlings stood up again,

unfurled their branches,

all of them loaded not with blossoms but with song.

That was the season people re-learned amazement,

followed by the autumn when they re-learned amazement again:

One morning he went ‘round his yard on a ladder.

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He paid no attention to everyone clapping,

just picked each bird and released it into the sky.

Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, most recently “The Book of Drought” (Texas Review Press, 2024), which won the X.J. Kennedy Prize in Poetry.

This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

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