This Is the Artist, the Parent

(on an untitled work by Sam Pink:
drawing, pen and ink with watercolor on paper)

—though whether he’s releasing
his creation to the world

or welcoming it home
is not apparent.

Then again, it is.
On second glance, or third,

what can be seen is a face upturned:
An eye. A nose or beak

tilted toward another face

lit by surprise at this returning bird.

*

Jeff Tigchelaar’s poems appear in Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Court Green, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Phoebe, The Laurel Review, LIT, Eleven Eleven, The Offending Adam, Southeast Review, Sugar House Review, North American Review, and Sand, as well as in Verse Daily and Best New Poets. His first book, Certain Streets at an Uncertain Hour (Woodley Press), won the Kansas Authors Club’s Nelson Poetry Book Award. He received a poetry fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.