August 2003

A Poem by Richard Tillinghast

Hear Richard Tillinghast read "The Nest" mp3

The Nest

The building of it took place right under our noses,
in the hedge that bordered our lives just off our porch.
So at first we missed it, busy about our own
arrivals and departures, till the nest was good to go:
a springy wicker hold-all slotted into a notch
where branches diverged like the ribs of a vaulted arch
in a chapel that sways with all breezes
that blow, gets soaked in every rain.

Those cardinals with their blurred red
flourishes, scarlet avatars of pure instinct
coming and going with twigs in their beaks. Next
three eggs, and the female brooding on her nest
like a feathery smooth boat at drydock,
like a china hen in a farmhouse kitchen.
Then three crowded skyward mouths, pure need,
three dowdy tulips gaping toward the sun.

But a day came when they were gone for good
and we were not around to see—
after weeks when they were the talk of our household:
nest built, eggs laid, chicks hatched and flown
past the porch and trellis and into the open sky,
leaving the two of us here on our own,
peering down into their derelict oval.
I never saw anything so empty.

Richard Tillinghast, professor of English, is the author of seven books of poetry as well as Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir of the poet Robert Lowell, with whom he studied as a doctoral student at Harvard in the mid-1960s. His undergraduate degree is from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.

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