well, since Dave's mentioning the dodo, and while the rhyme machine of K.
Barry, who may be related to Halle Berry for all I know, did get a little on my
nerves, it's evocation of those quaint features reminded me of some I love, so I'll
post this which I wrote recently, so, chaotic and all, my only excuse being its
mention of birds
best,
Rebecca
I could say
you are this red bird which flies by, lifting against the heavy weight
of the rain which has turned the world grey, for days,
as the water on the railing soaks my elbows,
you fly by, crying out, improbably crimson! streaked as if you took a bath
in a canister of pain, and your wings and body rise and fall in a short
ascending and descending, start and stop, as if the breath
that your singing required made your flight hesitate, almost asthmatic,
or I could say
you are these geese which walk by, having fallen to earth, lost in
a blizzard of storm, their wild honks circling
going nowhere in a winter that was being penetrated by spring,
thunder and lightning! and so they fell to earth and walk, loud
making of defeat a triumph, down the snow-covered street,
I could say
you are that mockingbird I heard in summer, fleeing
the sweat of my love for you going outside into the sweat
of the August night, at 4 in the morning, shattering the quiet
with innumerable cries, black and undisclosed in the blackness,
of that nexus, that location that only my heart can locate, spinning
around like a needle of iron in a basin of water, when the world
is made of nothing but water, and the voices rise out in the dark,
that finds you there,
I could say, even when splashed with my blood,
you danced like the young turkey buzzards that mistake
their black and white feathers sprouting out of their heads
for a permanent crowning, as if kings forever
in the realm, of death, how murderous
you were! and how savage!
but you are not any bird,
and if you say you are a bird, or if I say we both are,
it is because of the singing like this,
but I think it’s also because
in the realm of birds, only plumage
differentiates gender, there all gender is an appearance
and a performance, birds have no penises, and their cloacal
openings which in each are the same suffice,
just as the opening between us,
wound, or sweet sweat cunt, whatever, was enough
to give birth to all these voices
winding their way through the ruins, the small cities, the tormented
small villages, which we also made, for the truth
is you are not a bird,
and when the red bird flies by, with its improbable
song and color, or the geese make a triumph
of where they must walk, or two mockingbirds
become a forest of variegated voices, it is because
I think of you, it is the only way
I could touch you,
as if the world touching me were your hands holding
my face in your hands, as if
in saying or singing
as if I held your face in my hands, you know,
o beautiful one, that face which you do not know, which
persists, shining, beneath your masks, the gaze that you believe
does not exist, even though it plumblines into the depths
of all my strata and all the wells of darkest water, you who
I know where you are, and how, and feel by mercurial
ganglia and oxygenated breath rising out of the red marrow
of the bones, even though no one else knows who you are,
even though you don’t know who you are! incredible woman
I could say calling out in all the voices stolen and borrowed from other birds,
you are that tree I painted when I was too young to know
I was dreaming, a strong reaching out of the earth, and each of its branches
was a bird, wide sweep of wing unfolding, heron type beak raised in swirling
song, five of them birds or branches, a tree of birds, and all with the dancing
of girls, you are that endless girl, shy with bold disclosures
beneath every one of your siren painted masks, but
the truth is you are none of these things,
you are like no other being that has ever walked the earth,
you are the only one
I have ever loved like this, the only one that if you walked by
and I were dead, my bones in the ground, moldering
to worms and dust, would cry out at the touch of your footsteps
and call out your name, the only one that is my weather, my constellations,
my waning and waxing moon, and the only one who has ever looked
into my interior face, the only one my interior face
has ever gazed upon, somehow, one night,
when it seemed the universe held us finally, rocking together,
in its oceanic palms, though it was only a dream, but such
a reality that I do not know what to call you or how to call you,
you only you, woman, who
for one moment came into my woman’s arms,
and who can sing of this, and in what language, where
what is feared is not death but the beginning of life,
which arrives as never more than a dream
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