An Eastern Towhee showed up in the yard
scratching leaf litter for insects and seeds,
a dark hooded male with brick red flanks
and white breast, details I bury myself with today—
filling first my heart, and then the space
around my feet, a carpet of words like “hood”
like “flank” instead of “constant” and “blame,”
instead of “please why can’t we talk,”
or all the codes we have for leave me be,
all the ways two people can be lost
standing in their own back yard,
dragging a twig through the spring mud,
a boundary the rummaging birds will obscure.