Dan Gerber is the author of more than a dozen books, including fiction, essays, memoir, and poetry, including The End of Michelangelo; A Primer on Parallel Lives; Sailing through Cassiopeia, winner of the 2013 Society of Midland Authors Award for poetry; and Particles. He has received the Michigan Author Award and the Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature and has had work included in Best American Poetry. Gerber lives with his wife, Debbie, in the mountains of Central California.

His Last Days

by Dan Gerber

He spent his last days by the fountain in
the little square where the birds came to bathe.

He saw each bird as a kind of feeling he’d known,
imagining its movements as his own. Thrill


of cool water finding its way between feathers
and, at times, let himself become feathers,


and the drops of water that ball up and roll like
hose-rinse off a freshly waxed fender.
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