Cover

Title Page

Nightingale

PAISLEY REKDAL

COPPER CANYON
PRESS

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Dedication

In memory of Gregory Beckelhymer

The substance is not chaunged, nor altered,

But th’ only forme and outward fashion;

For every substance is conditioned

To change her hew, and sundry forms to don

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 3, canto 6

Why do you remove me from myself?

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 6.385

Nightingale

I

I

Psalm

Psalm

Too soon, perhaps, for fruit. And the broad branches,

ice-sheathed early, may bear none. But still my neighbor

waits, with her ladder and sack, for something to break.

A gold, a lengthening of light. For the greens to burst

into something not unlike flame: the pale fruit

blushing over weeks through the furred cleft creases:

a freckling of blood. Then the hot, sweet scent

of August rot, drawing wasps and birds and children

through the month. So much abundance, and the only cost

waiting. Looking at the tree, I almost expect the sound of bells,

a stone church, sheep in flocks. But no sound of bells,

no clarion call. The church is far down in the valley.

This tree should be an ancient, revered thing placed

at the heart of a temple. Instead, it is on a common

lot, beside a road, apartment buildings, a dog

sleeping in its yard. My neighbor has come here

neither as master nor supplicant. She simply plans

to fill a plastic sack with whatever she can take:

the sweet meat giving under the press of a thumb,

covering what is its true fruit: the little pit, hard

and almond-brown, that I’ve scooped out,

palmed, and planted to no avail. A better gardener

could make demands of such a seed, could train a tree

for what desire anticipates. But here the tree grows

only for itself. And if it bears no fruit for the killing