photo by Jim Fenster

                                                                
 Outlier

 The white-faced cardinal sits at the edge
 of a gathering of native birds
 who’ve come for black-oiled sunflower seeds.
  
 She’s a stunner, a real beauty among 
 the john and jane does,
 the house finches and dark-eyed juncos. 
  
 That she keeps to herself—
 teetering on the railing, waiting
 as shells litter the deck—
 that her detachment is a rare geography 
 pleases me.
  
 I’ve always loved the outliers:
        the ones who wear their deviations
        like crown jewels,
        whose otherness
        is fine plumage.
  
 While most of us shuffle forward in sensible shoes
 and hold our tongues,
 in the skies above,
 an outlier wings its way towards
 other galaxies.
  
 Can you imagine it,
 streaking across a nameless universe
 where gravity is but a distant memory?
  
 And can you imagine it,
 coming home to all that space undone
 an outlier, a constellation of one? 

Note: I borrowed the photo from another photographer/bird watcher because I couldn’t get close enough to get a good photo of the white-faced female cardinal who visits our bird feeder daily. Her white face is an effect of leucism, a wide variety of conditions that causes a partial loss of pigmentation in birds and animals.