Sparrows by Howie Good

Inside the Home Depot, I hear but can’t see the birds
chirping away among the exposed steel beams overhead –
house sparrows, probably. Halloween has only just ended.
The red Christmas poinsettias on display, when I look closer,
prove to be fabric. I ask a man in a carpenter’s apron who isn’t
a carpenter where the heavy-duty tarps are. “Aisle 41,” he says
and points. The word “cancer” follows me. It is the scariest word
in the language, scarier somehow than even “death.” I am being
murdered by my own body. The sparrows go on chirping their
simple three-note song as if there is no extra time for complexity.



Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.