89 Birds poems

Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels Tap-dance on the water. They pluck the tuna hatchlings As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry, Might once have picked up pearls From a broken necklace. Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them. Birds from above and big fish from below Rip at the pack until it comes apart Like Poland, with survivors in single figures. The krill, as singletons almost not there But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling, Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen— A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir And nullified, a deep-space mass extinction Watched only by the Hubble telescope. Make your bones in a shark family if you can. If not, be tricky to locate for sheer Translucence, a slick blip that will become— Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws— A lobster fortified with jutting eaves Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done, Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.

from my bed I watch 3 birds on a telephone wire. one flies off. then another. one is left, then it too is gone. my typewriter is tombstone still. and I am reduced to bird watching. just thought I'd let you know, fucker.

I. The nest was at rest for a time, not being made. Before the eggs were laid, it softened. The robin sleeping. Inside the house, the sound of laundry in the dryer, the sound of a zipper tumbling inside the apparatus, and shirts with buttons, as well as napkins and a tablecloth printed with blueberries and stalks of lily of the valley, oval, for the table with claw legs and extra leaves for guests. II. In one account, the angels come, their hands emerging from their wings like sentences staying, as long as it takes, for the windows to go from indigo to black, as long as it takes for a breath to land in the base of the belly, in the cavity wisdom tells us wisdom comes from or first dwells in, before it navigates the narrows of the throat, becomes mantra, becomes guttural, becomes spit to aspirate the language the mouth makes. The native obligation of this account to its subject is care. The form of music the wind chime makes registers the commitment of a furious system, filled with conviction, to the continued transformation of what is. Do not ask what has been lost. Ask what changed. An instrument of will, the guitar echoes this, a chord, more reminder than absolute, the hand arouses but does not create the scale. In this way what rests gets taken up. III. In another, the mind makes a decision to end its disorder. The mind wants first to end the face. The subject has had enough, one too many figures walking through the orchard, the call and response of conversation become an imposition on some other world unbroken by the idea of separate bodies, an idea one has never been convinced of, and so now it is a relief to believe what one has suspected, that separation a trick of perspective, though such a revelation does not undo the fatigue of existing in the continuing illusions of others. And yet, the obligation to be kind, to show interest in strangers when they visit with flowers, to family whose hands are empty, and to doctors, not to mention the pain. IV. In the last account, the explosions are too small to be seen, and oxygen takes both thirst and hunger away as it ceases to find a home in the lungs, and the patient, having ceased to feel, ceases to breathe, as the heart shuts down before the brain and shuts the dreaming down, the settling on a nest of images, not feeling any form of distress. The pathways to distress are blocked, but the senses doubled, the ears know the house more than they ever did, whose clothes occupy the dryer, which voice accompanies water. V. Angels be patient with this subject. I know what she would say to you if she could speak, if she could see you just inside the window whose top right pane frames what we call a family, when the almost mother bird finishes what she is thinking about, barely but still hidden from sight. If you stopped to look at the nest you would see a sleep so purposeful the ladder of adoration would reverse and you would stay on earth.

The winter wren is tiny and sounds enormous for something that size it fills the whole forest i think about people like that small in the world but filling the room

Forty thousand birds above the marsh in a moving cloud i pulled over and got out of the car and watched until they were gone late for everything

The birds start before it's light they don't wait for permission for me to be ready or for the sun they just start i'm learning from this

I track the warbler migration every may on a spreadsheet i've kept for eleven years people think it's strange but i know when spring is here before anyone else does

In october the birds get practical south is south no ceremony no goodbye just the decision and then the going

Before the alarm before the news before coffee the birds are already at it having their whole morning without asking anyone's permission