Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux (1952- ) was born in Augusta, Maine. She received a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. Her most recent collection of poetry is Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems and she has received many awards for her poetry. In 2020 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She now lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Bird

For days now a red-breasted bird

has been trying to break in.

She tests a low branch, violet blossoms

swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies

straight at my window, beak and breast

held back, claws raking the pane.

Maybe she longs for the tree she sees

reflected in the glass, but I’m only guessing.

I watch until she gives up and swoops off.

I wait for her return, the familiar

click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee

and scan the room, trying to see it new,

through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed.

Books piled in a corner, coats hooked

over chair backs, paper plates, a cup

half-filled with sour milk.

The children are in school. The man is at work.

I’m alone with dead roses in a jam jar.

What do I have that she could want enough

to risk such failure, again and again?

— Dorianne Laux