I am going to Home Depot with my boyfriend
to get a dehumidifier for the shop.
He already knows the specs:
how it holds 30 units, uses 8.6 kilowatt hours.
I have no input. I follow him
into the smell of sawdust and lumber.
It makes me wish I knew how to build things,
what I would do with a band saw.
 
We pass the scaffolds of storage shelving
and notice a bird fluttering in the rafters.
“Poor thing,” he says. In that moment,
I imagine him as Snow White.
The bird swoops down from a slump
in darted flight, lands on him
 
and then comes home with us. It wants to learn
how to weld, will repay with music lessons.
Practice, it sings, every day, vocalizing
to Verdi in the shop that night,
perched on my new fore plane
while I try my hand at truing the surface
of a plank, while the little ribbons
fall to the floor like miniature scrolls.
 
I offer to keep the strips and reuse them.
Maybe I could build a birdcage,
they could go at the bottom of it.
The bird just trills away.
It says, “Don’t do anything like that; like you,
I already have everything I need.”


This poem first appeared in Dark Matter: A Journal of Natural Metaphor (Winter 2016/2017).
Used here with permission.