Birds of a Feather
May was the happiest month, tantalizing
teenage tropes, mixing
me and me squared, finding
flowers finding me.
Summer kept us warm,
like defeat before victory;
away but not apart.
August reunited us, defeating deafening distance.
Two birds:
Sunny sorrow swallow and
Dictioncanary,
barely aware of her apparently
paralyzing stares, newly nestled
sharing summer myths mistold;
fossils of their futures
before legs could take their hold.
Still relatively stable and
tentatively able,
following a garnet love gem
and their white feathered friend,
painting the hills blue and red
with a coruscating paint
so plainly ephemeral
that the swallow might never know
the creating of something so faintly femoral.
Brisk trade winds
opening sea routes to
long-since sins
and the wholesome
incongruence of movements;
all of them milking
a pale fleshy flower
as he runs his beak
through each yellow feather,
as the river fills down South, and
still so caught in all her moving,
he bent towards herself the soothing
feathers of her down,
sinking into the river valley
hoping from within he’ll drown
such that every note
escapes her breathing
and gives to them their
sense of being, and
finally he has
buried his pale blue crest
in the darker peaks of her breast
until from the bird bath
she shakes herself anew
with rings of flowers around her eyes
after his small hours in her thighs.
But only so long
could he stretch atop her canopy,
where no other can appease,
for their respite
was just five days strong
and sealed by a flight.
The colds of December
embed their embers
in the amber that they laid
across redwood haze
and green mountains ablaze;
to be felt from the Dalles
through his ramshackle valves
Yet from above the river,
perched upon the snowy
Douglas Red Fir—
high and mighty just as her—
was an aging owl,
held to the highest esteem
in failing forests
and white collar streams,
who lifted his wings
to reveal something foul;
a malignant maggot
feasting on the time caught
within any thought,
as if he came to reclaim it.
Garuda, be near him
to shield him
from fossils that fall on his head
and the statue traps
he will walk unto his bed.
Because for the first time,
two vultures felt like doves
and he needed their love
for in time would come
January and his
beloved canary.
The same sweet notes
that gave him such sweet hopes
now clip his wings
and make him so human
and hollow
and hidden
and apart from a hesitant oblivion
where once upon a lilac night
stood Leo Minor amidst his fight;
mane unfurled and jaws spread wide,
content in catastrophe
and an infinite astral blasphemy,
devouring Sagittarius
believing just a clock
could ever bury us,
But now,
is just a careening crab
awaiting his halo hollow way
amidst a sky so pigeon drab
reunited with the Milky Way.
But through golden ringlets
of the Redwood oculus,
she will move himself
about her wrist
and prove to him he still exists
and that were they to stand still
long enough
the sun would move
around us
and take the Van Gogh sky
that shrinks that sky
that shrinks me,
where the sky
meets the grass -
meet me.