Personal Ornithology

Go ahead: flutter and swoop
for the feather-light essential
wooded, soft winged.
Later, you will begin

mourning yourself in songs
others adore. It kills you
to not know that.

At Dusty Wind, the sad
little school of knockabout
chroniclers, stunted hands
write out your past
the solemnity of each day
spent in a room
of colorful birds
wingless, blind
wildly confusing
flight
with the idea
of flight.

You trap and bind
your flittered thoughts
of a future that outlasts
you for who wouldn’t
want to be a cedar waxwing
showing us the best way to live
on the abrupt edge
of the deep forest
where we all were hatched?

You speak for all of us,
the sad little birds
in brief triumph
over gravity
discovering the bright desolation
we so dislike
and love
in one another.

Sea of Trees

Under the weeping willow
you step up to freedom
thick rope in hand you are
all beautiful loss, your long
neck a swan’s, golden chalice
for drinking sweet wine
or hemlock you will
offload, your eyes
dark circled, bright
with knowing you let go
endure the thickening
the tightened moments
of rasp and swell
your bruised slate
wiped clean,
purple wisteria glistening
in a light summer rain.

Hipneck Reverie

a daisied field erased
of expression, white birch trees
an illumination imposed on your
retina, your shuttercock brain
spring downpour in remission
for the moment
the rifle an iron slavechain
around your sunburned neck

you want to eat
what you know

you aim into the great
blue-green nothing
like the inside of a postcard
of a perfect day in the wild

you could be anyone else
with a carcass and a smile