Poems by Christine Gentry

Cardinal

by Christine Gentry

From Canary Summer 2023

Christine lives between the schist outcroppings of Marcus Garvey and Central parks and the flowing waters of the Harlem and Hudson rivers. Her favorite neighbors are a gnarled, 250-year-old elm and--of course--a red cardinal that often visits the linden tree outside her window.

When I was five, my father built a pigeon coop in our backyard. It had cubbies where they could nest and a chicken wire bay window where they could see the world while they pecked at seeds and throat-pumped tiny gulps of water.

At the top of the back wall was a small entrance guarded by thick, hanging wires that gave when pushed from the outside but locked when pushed from the inside. Whenever Daddy opened the front door, a cooing cloud of pigeons would rise into the trees and settle onto the power lines, where they would stay until called in by the metallic sound of him dumping seeds into the feeder. They’d rush in a descending swarm through that little entrance and shove each other to get to the fattest seeds. I loved watching them through the chicken wire.

I don’t remember them dying. They must have. Or maybe they just stopped coming back. One day we had a full pigeon coop, the next we had a shed. Daddy put a freezer in there and made toolboxes of the cubbies.

One day, my mom asked me to get some ice cream from the freezer. When I opened the shed door, a flash of red flew out of a cubby and ricocheted off the front wall, coming to rest in the far corner of the bay window. A cardinal, trapped by the one-way door. I don’t know how long he’d been in there, open-beaked and gasping.

I approached him, slowly. He burst into another frenzied panic, hitting every wall, somehow missing the open door. When he landed again, he was on the floor in the corner nearest me. Exhausted and resigned to death, he allowed me to scoop him into my palms.

A warm, soft ball of fast breaths and indistinguishable heartbeats, he turned his head to the side and fixed one wet, black-rimmed eye on me—unblinking and eerily human. I stood there with him in my hands, stunned by his beauty. I finally turned and walked through the front door.

At the first sight of sky, he exploded into flight, disappearing into the tangled branches of our cottonwood tree, raining summer snow into my hair.