On Cardinal Virtue by Nicky Beer
By Alysse Kathleen McCanna
Hello listeners, I’m Alysse Kathleen McCanna, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m thrilled to share a poem with you by Nicky Beer.
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Beer has received many honors including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
Here’s her poem, Cardinal Virtue.
CARDINAL VIRTUE
At first, I can’t name the bird falling deliberately
from the tree’s high crooks: a grey flash, tipped with carmine.
Lit on a fencepost, its wings smolder.
It must smell of ginger.
Bird, your life would terrify me.
Bones full of air, belly full of hunger,
the underbrush dense with murders.
Death is a twist, a pinfeather lost,
a stumble over a slowing pebble. This is not a life
of flight, but flight from. Perhaps you don’t suppose
that there’s any other way, which is itself
a kind of mercy. Perhaps you don’t suppose.
Your heart’s the size of a small clod and,
so I’ve heard, egg-shaped. I learned
to measure my own by the scale of my fist,
and my height from the distance
between the forefingers at the ends of my spread arms.
Physical logic is contrast,
ratio, degree. We know desire
by the scarcest shades on our skin:
brief flushes, bitten lips.
How could we sort anything at all
without rarity? There are acres more night
than moon, hours more sleep than dream.
Bird, when you are half-alive
in the jaws of our cats, a yellow ribbon
of innard dragging on the dirt,
remember that we dreamed our radiant dead
would become more like you,
as though the progeny of some impossible
lust between one of ours and one of yours.
Incomprehensible thing, drenched in the color
of something we call joy,
stuffed with something that we call song,
you are always first
inhuman.
Used with Permission
I love this poem’s clever title, Cardinal Virtue. In many cultures, cardinals are viewed as spiritual messengers, associated with communications of peace and comfort from dead loved ones. Beer’s bird, “a grey flash, tipped with carmine,” is probably a red-crested cardinal, and seems less messenger and more embodiment of some cosmic virtue–not prudence, justice, or temperance, three of the four cardinal virtues in classical philosophy, but fortitude seems befitting. What can birds teach us about endurance, about courage?
Across generations, there’s a commonality that we become aware of reaching middle age when we’re all suddenly obsessed with birds. This is the second poem I’ve shared with you that has a bird at its heart, but really, it's no surprise that birds loom so large in the poetic consciousness–here, Beer captures both the transcendent fantastic and the macabre reality of life as a bird. Her language is at times luscious, and then stark, drawing a line that delineates bird life from human life, while also tethering those lives to the same emotional and mortal paths.
When I was in my early 20s, birds built a nest over my front door. One by one, the babies fell, dying in bushes, on the concrete steps, with the parents nowhere to be found. The final bird, still alive, I rescued: researched, bought supplies from the local pet store, and grandly daydreamed that I could intervene in nature’s course. I delicately fed it, warmed it, and delayed its death by just a few days.
As Beer says, it was inhuman–when I woke one night to tend to it, I found its mouth open, head flung back, somehow unresponsive to my constant fretting and care–“death is a twist, a pinfeather lost.” I was devastated by its demise, by all the little deaths that had come before, by my own lack. What a terrifying life, small bird, and a death I’ve tried to capture many times in a poem, but to no avail. Beer succeeds here: we feel the fear, see the discrepancy between our human imposition of beauty on a bird, and its true wildlife.
As I write this, it is springtime, but when you hear this, summer will be in full swing. The birds will be fledglings, ready to leave their nests. Let us see them in their fortitude, their courageousness, in their enduring flights from home into the wild unknown.
Thank you for listening to Poets on the Plains. I’m Alysse Kathleen McCanna, coming to you from Eagle, Colorado.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2025 Colorado Book Award in poetry. Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley. She and her husband spend most of their time tending to our animal menagerie, keeping houseplants alive, and exploring the BLM trails near their home.https://www.alyssemccanna.com/
FEATURED POET
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010) both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel. Find more at https://www.nickybeer.com/
