On her last visit to the hospice, my niece
watched a flock of red-winged blackbirds
settle in the tree outside the window,
as if waiting for my mother to join them.
My brother, the pastor, calls this a God wink.
And since she died, I’ve been waiting for one:
an apparition, an exception to my unbelief,
the rare bird, unseasonable butterfly. But the world
is just as she left it. This morning I stood
on the bluff above a bend in the creek
and heard the call of the pileated woodpecker.
I watched it fly from tree to tree until I lost
it somewhere deeper in the woods.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Pileated woodpeckers
are becoming more common every year.