A hummingbird flies into a window
that looks like the sky. Everything around here
looks like the sky. The sky looks tiger striped.
They call that kind of cloud
something. I know somebody
who knows about clouds. I could find
out the name. Everything around here
has a name.
2.
The hummingbird fell to the deck. My husband picked it up.
—What did it feel like in your hand?
—Nothing. It felt like nothing.
—Where is it now?
—Gone.
—Dead?
—Not dead. It flew away. It disappeared and it disappeared again.
3.
I’ll tell you a joke. A hummingbird flew into a window…
I’ll tell you another joke. Treachery,
we were friends once.
4.
In dreams the bird
weighs more, so you can feel it
when you pick it up. So when
it dies it seems
like something actually happened.
It’s a word
bound
around your hand and a sign
at the stripped road.
A mylar star on a plastic stick
tied to the sign.
Blacktop. Post. A fat star’s
wrinkles taut. It’s stuffed.
It’s shining.
There’s going
to be a party around here somewhere.
The bird weighs nothing waits nowhere.
The sky looks like a window and it flies right through.
A hummingbird got trapped in the castle stairwell today. Dead or nearly dead, we took it to a sheltered spot outside, and Bethany covered it with flowers.
A literal hummingbird flying into a window is just one reading of Melissa Ginsburg’s 2013 poem. Ginsburg highlights the briefness of a fellow poet’s life by including the years of his birth and death in her dedication “for Erik Lemke (1979 – 2012)” — a suggestion to the reader, along with the vastness of the sky, that this poem is bigger than one bird. The hummingbird seems to represent the kind of death that is so sudden and nonsensical, it doesn’t seem entirely real — even as you grasp it, it seems to have no weight.
Readers have puzzled over Ginsburg’s choice of “Tigers” for the title of this poem — I think it’s a title that’s not entirely for us; it’s in part something meaningful to Melissa Ginsburg and Erik Lemke on a personal level. But to my ear, there is also something of “tigers in red weather” in it — a line from a famous poem by Wallace Stevens, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.” To me, there’s also something of Craig Arnold in this poem — a poet whose death in 2009 was also so sudden and nonsensical, it doesn’t seem entirely real: he disappeared into a volcano in Japan, leaving no body, but a great deal of weight, behind.
— Ellen