You are asking the wrong question—
that is my fault
in part;
it’s not about any bird but why
the bird is nothing like
you and how you
must therefore take it
as far down your throat and into the soft cell
as possible.
Here is the right question:
Once flying footless on these back roads I saw a dead fawn fetal circled
circled in the long grass
and jewelly weeds.
I returned
every day I returned to look at her peripherally: it’s true
no thing should ever die
and dissolve
unwitnessed, but the eye’s eye
contains too much, is constrained by veins that memorize. Anyway
the weather turned a while. I stayed away until when I finally returned she was
a perfect circle of bones, and then one day she was nothing, or, no,
something else: a perfect spherical indentation in all the long and jewelly grass.
Somewhere unseen behind me
her mother? Was there? That
is the right question. What’s not
but what keeps getting asked
is—
was it one of those
holy spots where your voice is swallowed
when you try to say,
when you point
and try to say: there;
meaning! I am
on a good day: made of hunger, of
three good hands and one inscribed
by fire—
but that is the body’s body hand.
It cannot, because it will not, know
what its mate look likes. Did you know
they work ceaselessly in the increasingly tender dark? That is one of the right questions. Light, and
the space between
the amount of time light requires
to exit the image
for your eyes—
and the eyes, realizing, reaching
for it means most things
will have already turned away, degraded—
but you
are the only present. I wired for you the biological thinking toward a kind of way;
the way—truly it is exactly this way—
every ancient idol contains as aspect
its own antithesis: like so, listen! Listen: healing
if the lady of war;
time,
if the lady of inscrutability;
bird,
if the lady of uncovered fires. Speaking of the bird.
In the early evening it storms; I watched
birds get blown from the trees. Listen;
This is a real thing that happened.
Later I found parts of their nests
in my hair. It wasn’t accompanied
by hunger so
it didn’t mean anything. Localized exceptions—
brontoscopic, maybe, but localized nonetheless.