Monday poem (from last week --- a world ago) (unfinished)

[fflo]

So much happened today
I was nearly asleep
before I remembered
the cardinal this morning,
fluttering in the snow
while my wild dog
assaulted her with sound
and would have done more

but was tethered, barking
while I trudged to the patient,
carried her in a shovel with snow
to a spot by the lopping pine.
She was not okay.  I
couldn't get her set
on a low branch, tried
again and held her

with just a little snow
in my worn brown leather glove
as she cuddled her head
against my thumb, as if
for warmth, and looked right at me
through weak slits of eyes
and tried to chirp, the pointy beak
opening wide, no sound but the air.

I am not the wildfoul rehabilitator
my ex once took a bird to
20 miles from the city
and then stopped eating chicken.

I didn't know how to help.

I brushed snow from her face
and underbelly, by curled feet,
and stood there with her
another minute while the dog
hollered and hollered at us,
and right before I put her down
in a spot under the tree
she chirped again, and I heard it.

In the afternoon, she was gone.
The next morning the dog
found a bloody-end bird wing
at the neighbor's yard, 50 feet away,
but it was black, not her pale
greenish brown.