Hummingbirds and Memory

My mind wanders like a hummingbird in flight, flitting to an image and resting, then zipping off to another temporary spot, and another, resting like the hummingbird briefly on limb or leaf.

In forty-five minutes on my deck spent watching three hummingbirds fighting for my feeder, Betsy's love of watching ruby-throats here and fantastically colored rufous and Anna's hummers in Portland zipped into peals of children's laughter next door and zapped into memories of happy summers in the yard or on the Warrior River and then catapulted into images of lightning bugs jarred in my bedroom and sped into the black butterfly balanced in the redbud tree reminding me of

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

At the end, thanks to her daughter and son-in-law, Betsy wasted no moments in the sun, watching hummingbirds, and today I fly with her in memory on their wings.