The Bluejay

I saw him on the bench
as I pulled into the carport,
a bluejay, on his back,
pencil-lead feet curled
around a ghost perch.

I took my dinner inside
to eat before it got cold
and to give the bluejay
a chance to rouse if
it was only a stunning. 

It was not. 

Satiated,
I went to the shed,
got the shovel, then thought twice,
and got two shovels. 

With one flat at the bluejay's edge,
the other tipped him onto the metal --
I feel it was a him --
bluejays so often seem more 
they/them. 

I suppose I could have
thrown him in the woods. 
But I didn't.
I took him to the spot
where I dump yard trash --
not trash trash, yard trash --
sticks and weeds and the
dried husks of hanging
baskets I forgot to water. 

I dug a grave, a shallow grave,
no more than six inches.
I was tired, and my full belly
didn't care for so much activity.
But, still, I dug a grave. 

I put the body of the bluejay
in the hole and stood for a moment.
Should I say something?
I didn't know what.
I just looked at him,
saw him, stayed with him
in that moment. 

It took just two heaping
shovels of dirt to secure
him in his final rest,
and I thought,
I wonder if he knows that
every time I take yard trash
to this spot, I will
think of him.
He will be remembered.
HIs grave will be visited.
He will be mourned. 

I took my shovels back to the shed
and only then did I think of my father,
placed into a cremation oven
before I could see his face
one last time,
buried in a jar that sits 
on my stepmother's mantel,
I suppose,
or was he scattered
in the mountains?
No one ever told me. 

I have no grave to visit,
no headstone to decorate,
no symbolic point where
his memory lives on demand.

His voice fades a little every day.
His smell, I can almost . . . 
not quite.
His laugh, the music of his laugh,
dying away. 
And I don't know where to go
to bring any of it back
even for a moment. 

So,
       I named the bluejay 
                                            "David."