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.