Good Year

January. I pluck it, this feather flapping in the high mesquite only head-high, caught by the down, iridescent, turkey. Another feather hugging the ditch along the fence line and another... A coyote somewhere naps happy, grinning like the feather evolved from a leaf. What luck. Clouds lift above the field as if to swallow my eye into hunger. Good hunger. The greatest eye must behold me like an ember dropped into a finch nest, and I smoke at the mouth like a gun dreaming in a safe of a war it can win by virtue of its praise. I have lost the killer phrase I concocted on my country walk with the feather in my pocket. I cock it.