He must have planned it well, looked at that blank
piece of hill and thought there, I'll build it there.
Not Bleak House - the first of the red brick palaces
on the Dyke Road out of Brighton, home now
to gynaecologists, drug barons, self-made men -
but his shed, his bird mausoleum, where he could stash
the decades plundered from the air, all walled up
in glass - ptarmigan and curlew, meadow pipit, fulmar,
nightingale, swift. His wife was dying. The building
carried on regardless. Was he too obsessed to notice,
the wrought iron trusses the builders angled
for the roof, how thin they were? Too worried to care,
they might buckle sometime later, not carry weight,
like broken wings in air? How she'd railed against
the parlour full of birds, the smell, the cases,
the hours of hunting and arranging, the never there.
So he'd conceived this temple for his passion,
where walls of glass rose sixteen feet and would reflect
the image of their master. The nurse he liked.
She had a pigeon's plumpness, nesting warmth.
Some trickle of romanticism led to patterned arches,
a dream of honeymoon in Tuscany bagging thrush
or hornbill, some idea of profit from the specimens,
just like a church, a visitor attraction on the main road
from Devil's Dyke to Palace Pier. His wife seemed
like a heron when he found her cold and grey
in the silent room. The nurse replaced her
like a case slid along the shelf. Her friends cooed
and complimented such a catch, a minor celebrity,
the bird man, in his big, empty house. But why
the shed? Why the dockyard structure on the downs.
He keeps them there, she says. The birds.
The cash is running out. He's shuffled his investments
to underpin the shed, but even cutting corners
there's little left to realise the dream, the queues,
the fancy posters, the bus stop right outside the door.
One night he's drunk himself oblivious, misses
the step an eighth of an inch too low between the shed
and the vestibule of the house. In three days he's as dead
as the ospreys and the magpie, the goldfinch and the wren.
Six months on, his widow is remarried to a lawyer. All trace
of Booth is erased. The shed is sold to the council. The house
falls into disrepair. The trusses in the roof of the museum
start to bend. Motionless, the birds stare into history. Years
flutter into decades, centuries. Their smell lingers in the air.

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