Snipe Hunting

Out the spring window a blue jay masquerading
as my dead aunt or maybe vice versa.
I tell the jay, just in case, my craving
for pie, though blackberries
on their thick treacherous vines
won’t arrive for another season.
I tell the jay, now grooming a blue black wing,
mapped and mysterious as a planetarium,
where I have been dancing and the book
David read by himself. I explain
my children, David and Rose. The jay cries.
The corn and the honeysuckle and my aunt
and my grandmother Rose all still in August
in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Still 1976.
It is dusk. We have our brown paper bags
open and ready. The planets are rising.