36 - For the Bird Who Carries and Lightens

Stone beach a bed

bird spreads pebbles

to ease

the weight from heavy places

in the piled-up day.

Sleeps on rock, too tired

from evening-out

our crushing castles

to fly home.

Feet in the night clutch

at daystones ferried

place to place,

even dreaming.

At sea height

the beached are beautiful.

Jellies light and stars

stud the ocean’s coronet rim;

drowsy eyes the dazzle

washing fin and feather

in the watery ink of

all the hard light-lines

unpainting fade of

land to liquid

at the sun’s egress.

Plume sighs little billows

bird on warm

rocks heard the water

helping him

equal the beach.

It smooths the sea glass

for his soft bones,

sending shell-gifts up

as shields from the deep.

30 - Passer Aux

God fell the morning we kids found

a baby starling on the lawn.

Stepping close cat-softly

our gasping pupils gulped

the light off thick grass

swelled with verdant juice,

arrogant to outdo the absurdity

of a bird in the dirt. Everything

was strange. I pictured

his feet black roots, feathers

shoots and fronds of night

and scattered white seeds

for planting flight in Earth.

But silent, hurt, and sunk in

adolescent bloat his downy

starscape a wilt of absent heaven,

stolen on the descent.

Order: passeriforme, passeri

same as those penny-sparrows who

never fall without the Father.

We tucked the little aeronaut

into a shoebox bed and blanket,

cradled as the car flew to

wherever white-gloved

ministers could right this

blot on invincible birdhood.

We couldn’t stay to see

if he would fly again, though

they all smiled nicely

in that lying way.

Who is responsible for flight?

Where does it go when birds die?

De passer à travers ma vie,

passer aux oubliettes,

mes passereaux infinie.

28 - Fluid Offenses

At dinner, sat in a high-backed wood chair,

trained to gulp tepid milk silently.

He coached me to open my throat so the drink

could pour down without resistance,

no deep inside churn of wet gush heard,

taught soundlessness so no prim ear

could tell that I did things to live.

Swallowing was the first way I learned

that my body, traitor, was an unfit home.

I would also learn, later, some other ways.

I sat by the bay, listening, all the water safe

out there and my mind became an ocean.

In nautical lore, the swallow is an omen

a sign of the shore, to follow for harbor

by cries from their velvet brown throats.

But I, I in my wood boat flung far from the earth

knew no birds could find me to sing.

For the roaring wide sea sprawls

and swallows my edges and anchors.

27 - At the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

They sell dried yellow corn in

fifty cent brown paper sacks

taken past the concrete embankment

on down to fowl pondside, where

goose beaks bicker on

my corn cup palms,

hard plastic tong mouths of need

pinching kernels, me.

I, five, am flushed with an eminent

sense of importance.

We kids learn on these educational trips.

My grain-grown flock would do

anything for cheap gold

magic beans. And I

made them eat off my shoes.

Learn, and repeat.

Back home, my father

would dangle Circus Peanuts

over my head, saying

“Dance like a dog.”

12 - Avian Laze

I lie nested, a moony, rumpled bird,

dreaming up caricatures of flight.

Lax-limbed waiting proves that wings are unlike sails,

demand a casting out to snag their hooks

on the tumbling silk of cloud-marbled sky.

Blue the dispassionate banner of heights

flown by my eyrie — as indifferent toward furled feathers

as blown-away hats and casual mortality —

I should know better the unlikelihood of wind

to net me in the tangle of its sheets,

all a ruffle and rousing of slick pinions

spiriting me high like tented paper.

But I’ve forgotten the flex and crackle

of a sober climb’s full musculature, and

how to measure out the needed

tendon-lengths like strings

for a taut kite:

I’m indolent for the dim and shifting

shadows cast in the caves of my eyes.