Sebastian tells me there’s a bluebird tat on his left breast. He says that “Bluebird” is his favorite poem. That’s the one that opens there’s a bluebird in my heart that / wants to get out / but I’m too tough for him. Then he begins unraveling a female cardinal entangled in a mist net.

Excited that he likes any poem, I tell him that when I heard Bukowski read at St. Marks Church, he slung a six-pack onto the stage & finished it off to the cheers of the packed sanctuary. Sebastian places a stick inside the young bird’s big beak so she doesn’t nip him as he bands her. He says that bird poems are usually dark.

Someone posted today that ICE vans were out in force, hunting the valley for illegals. Years before, nightriders and regulators searching for runaways. Bloodhounds panting through swamps. An unidentified spokesman said all options were on the table. He talked like he knew what he wanted to destroy.

I was taught that to live is to exist in the intersections. Does that mean, I wonder, at the junction between stop & go? The divide between asylum & death? And I’m wondering about Rilke, if he took his own advice— crossed the Rhine, eluded the shallows. Changed his life. Or was that just talk?

Bukowski guzzled a can in one gulp after reading “Bluebird.” He relished the crowd’s adulation. I say, stay in there, I’m not going / to let anybody see / you. Sebastian, with his associates’ help, frees a dragonfly & then a flailing hummer caught in the net. They also band two chickadees, a song sparrow, a catbird (the one migrant) & a house wren. Each is weighed & measured. A morning’s work. Neither conceptual nor imitative. Not just poetry blather.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that / wants to get out / but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke / and the whores and the bartenders / and the grocery clerks / never know that he’s / in there.

After all the data has been compiled: band numbers, color codes, breast feathers parted for gender ID, Sebastian plucks out a tail feather so he can approximate age, then releases the bird. Nets are rolled up, scales & bands packed away, paperwork handed over. Usually the birds are tentative for a few hours but soon are back at the feeders. Frenetic. Everything’s on the table for them.

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“Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski, quoted in “Banding,” was published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Harper Collins, 2009.