You Are a Soft Subject
bird is no thief.
hers is a deathless call.
strain all night in the doorway
you'll never hear it.
that's how good things last:
they go unnoticed.
bird clipped her face on the side
of a mountain range.
the rocks didn't mean to.
she baulked at heaven,
the concept unnerved her.
when she could, she flew high
enough to peek inside.
that's how the sky split open, that one time.
bird has love on the brain
the kind of love that only brass and strings
can sing about. Coltrane and Monk
and Mingus and Parker and Coleman.
she tries to hide the secret in her mouth,
her back arched for flight.
bird convinced the sky to lift
it got wider and wider and wider,
dizzy with grief. nothing lives up here.
no heaven, no passengers travelling home.
her one eye is fixed up, up, up, always up
looking for that soft place
she's heard you talk about.
where there are footprints between the stars.
bird has been missing for 299 days now
her ankles are filled with fluid.
feathers drifting, her one eye glued to a door,
the other, looking down. she misses you, she wants
to tell you how she saw an eclipse happen
from the innermost arc of the moon
bird doesn't mind not being invited.
her clipped wings are bound for
abstraction, floating back to earth
where a child will find them.
bird climbs inside of saturn, through
that tiny door, just big enough for a tooth.
and this is where bird slips, pirouetting
through heaven, where she caught a glimpse of you.
bird knows when to quit and that the
river knows most everything. she knows
when she's losing, when she’s got it wrong.
most of all she knows that the sky is a
bloated, sad woman, stuffed full of sticky sheets
of music: jazz, orchestra, mellow strawberry jam.
but bird is no thief. she puts everything back
where she found it: her small
body caving in, the river
complaining around it. her little
jawbone leaking light on the side
of a mountain, where you live with your
harpsichord, your hummingbird feeder.
where you’ll live and you’ll die, on and on like this
forever.