---
title: Last passenger
genre: verse

id: last-passenger
toc: "Last passenger"

project:
    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
    class: autocento

TODO: revise based on reading notes
...

| Memory works strangely, [spooling its thread][]
| over the [nails of events][] barely related,
| creating finally some picture, if we're
| lucky, of a life---but more likely, it knots
| itself, catches on a nail or in our throats
| that gasp, as it binds our necks, for air.

| An example: today marks one hundred years
| since your namesake, the last living passenger
| pigeon, [died in Cincinnati][].  It also marks
| a year since we last spoke.  Although around
| the world, zoos mourn her loss, I'm done
| with you.  I mourn no more your voice, the first
| sound I heard outside my body that reached
| [into my throat and set me ringing][].  But that string---

| memory that feels sometimes more like a tide
| has yoked together, bound your voice to that bird,
| the frozen, stuffed, forgotten pigeon---my heart
| is too easy, but it must do---to blink, to flex
| its unused toes, slowly thaw to the wetness
| of [beating wings][], fly to me again, and alight,
| singing full-throated, on my broken shoulder.

[spooling its thread]: roughgloves.html
[nails of events]: when-im-sorry-i.html
[into my throat and set me ringing]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
[beating wings]: cold-wind.html
[died in Cincinnati]: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/meet-martha-the-very-last-passenger-pigeon/380473/