What Hummingbirds Do

She hangs over my window feeder just an instant,
dips her bill, hovers skittish
and afraid, the way we all distrust
what we do not know, streaks away
then back to sip again.
Here in the East we see only those
called Ruby Throats. The males have all
the color. The female at my window seems
more gray than green without a spot of scarlet.

Once in a Southwestern city park
before flying home
I watched more hummingbirds, and different
than I had ever seen, come and go
from a feeder, beating copper and emerald wings,
flashing throats orange, violet, fuchsia.
A woman beside me on the bench murmured
their names ‑‑ Rufous, Calliope, Black‑Chinned.
When she stood to walk with me,
looking for other birds, her brown hair hung
flat and dull onto her back.

We moved slowly, exchanging details,
as women do, of our families grown away
and what we do when men
are not beside us. Suddenly this woman I had known
for half an hour said straight He’s having an affair.
Her hands fluttered up and dropped.
He said he stopped, but I know
that’s where he is today.
My feet timed themselves with hers
in woods so dry twigs crunched with every step.

She talked of years of keeping house
and moving town to town with his career.
She told about dinners carefully prepared
for businessmen he brought around
her polished table, and her small future
as an artist always shrinking
with her years. Should I stay? she asked.
I who had made choices of my own
for other reasons long ago had scant advice.

At home my hummer pauses now outside the glass
to look at me, then turns her back
and settles tiny feet along the feeder’s rim
to sit while she drinks the offered nectar long and slow.

Louise Barden is the author of Tea Leaves, winner of the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s chapbook contest, and a finalist for the Southwest Review’s 2017 Marr Prize. Her poems have been published in Chattahoochee Review, Timberline, Willawaw and others. She has recently been drawn from North Carolina to Oregon by grandchildren.

Judge  Jennifer Richter’s two poetry collections have both been named Oregon Book Award Finalists: her second book, No Acute Distress, was chosen by Major Jackson; her first, Threshold, by Robert Pinsky.  Richter has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years.  She currently teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA Program.