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      October 4, 2021On Finding a Wren Below Our Bedroom WindowJack Ridl

      It would have lived had where we sleep
      still been the woods that now begins
      thirty feet or so from the window.
       
      It lay in the palm of my hand. Its head
      sloped away from its wing and
      opened the calm pink of its neck.
       
      I think of our daughter. I think of
      my wife. I think of it all as I lay
      the wren under a layer of mulching
       
      leaves under the bird feeder, the leaves
      entering the alchemy of compost,
      what we and all there is can become.
       
      Above her soggy last nest, and a darkened
      space, the feeder is sunflower-filled. I walk
      back into our house, go to the window.
       
      Chickadees, white-throated sparrows,
      a cardinal are back at the feeder. Later
      today I will need to fill it again.

      from #72 – Summer 2021

      Jack Ridl

      “My father was the head basketball coach at the University of Pittsburgh. After failing to make it as a writer of songs, I thought, ‘Why not poetry? Same thing, right?’ I was introduced to the poet Paul Zimmer and brashly asked if he would help me out. He asked to look at some poems I was lugging around. After reading a few, he said, ‘Sure, I’ll help you out. We will, however, start all over.’ I gulped, said okay, and asked what I should pay him. He said, ‘Ya know what I’d really like instead of cash? I’d like to be able to go to your father’s locker room any time I want, before and after a game.’ I was dumbfounded. That’s where I grew up. Nothing full of wonder there. It was my first lesson in vulnerability and exploring the unknown, but of course I didn’t realize it. He then said, ‘I’ll tell you when I think you’ve written a poem.’ After six weeks, not a word about what I gave him being a poem. Then six months. Then a year. I asked if I should quit. He said, ‘If you want.’ Coach’s kids don’t quit. Two and a half years later, Paul looked up from what I’d handed him, smiled, and said, ‘You wrote a poem.’ That was 50 years ago. I can’t imagine having a richer life.”