The Bird

I

You rolled that worm in your beak, I watched you

Until the threshold of decay claimed your heart.

I can imagine this featherless avian with wings

Protruding past the context of thick pine branches

And you sway like a mourner when the wind

Scrapes your hollow bones in the dry afternoon.

You fertilize the atmosphere with your tawny skin.

Let the coroner assume you departed on your own terms,

Smelling the world before you, shaded

Between picket fences in your ideal retirement

And your funeral pyre of green. Altar to oxygen,

Where ammonia might be needed

To desecrate your remains, remnants,

Remembrance. But why would we bury

Poultry? We drank absinthe for you,

And we sat around and imagined a world

Where processions of insects honored their god.

The owls in mourning roiled and rolled like dervishes

In deserted plazas with more bullet holes

Than mouths to feed.

You were only a bird because you dragged comets

Like worms and died the death of a persona-non-grata.

II

But this was you, child of the sky, with stardust

Streaking across your cheeks, entangled

In a web of your untruthful wings;

Parachute of a cosmonaut or a waxwing.

You are not a bird at all, but a descendant

Of circumstance. Planting flags on the moon

Won’t grow you a country and planting

Your body won’t grow you a self.

But I see you, swinging crazed

From your branch. You implore a proper

Burial of mammalian proportion, beneath

The dirt; A half-hearted inscription

Delivered to the coroner

a month late, on a napkin.

But let’s assume you went

Without agency, wielding star-spangled 

Knives and you swallowed your last drops of blood

From the last worm you had caught.

Your helmet dropped, glitter eyes form one;

White plastic encasing your talons,

Decaying off your arm like wings,

Oxygen apparatus hanging like tail feathers,

Eyes wild like the tree caught prey,

Tied up in years to come and swallowed

By the earth, songs of electronics

And wires only left for the ears of blind giants.