Flyway

Maxine Scates

The wind has come up
and now there is a cloud behind the mountain.
How many times did she tell me the story
of my birth? The story ended when she’d say,
and that was the happiest day of my life, and
I’d feel a little sad because I’d had no child
and would never have a day like hers. Sometimes,
I can see the river bottom and its glitter
of stones. Then a fish leaps in sunlight rippling
the surface. Sometimes, I listen to the birds,
our seers, the pileated always laughing. I’ve read
the dead in dreams are never dead,
and yes, it is their aliveness that is reassuring,
their going on even as they leave us here. Just now
the shadow of wings, and a far-off child’s voice
shouting Hey, Mom.

Maxine Scates is the author of four volumes of poetry, including My Wilderness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). The recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Scates lives in Eugene, Oregon, on Kalapuya land..

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About this Poem

“A ‘flyway’ refers to the routes of migrating birds, the pathways they follow, and is an apt metaphor for the pathways a poem can follow. A few months after my mother died, I was staying in a cabin on a river where I had never been before which was populated by birds flying through. It was my birthday, and I’d never had a birthday without my mother, though I’d had almost seventy with her. And in that open, moving space where anything can happen, yes, I saw the shadow of wings, and then I heard a child far off, calling.”
—Maxine Scates

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At dusk the streetlights stand like beacons to the underworld, a girl runs toward me beaded with rain and sweat. I think husk, wheels— seeds rattle, shake loose and a candle is held to the egg's red mass she is too young to see.

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