Like a Bird Alone on a Roof

…Answer me quickly./

My days vanish like smoke;/

my bones burn like glowing embers.  Song 102/

 

Air thrashed the leaves in its teeth—/

a yellow-eyed cougar let loose in our trees/

or a pair of golden angel wings/

flapped and warned of something big—/

 

beyond our fence.  We caught our breath,/

stopped air-bent toward the trees/

already lit with cackles, cries tropical and wild;/

Multi-colored toucans (I told my lover)/

 

have traded their enchanted isles/

for the Pacific Northwest/.

And now, reveled and now, war/

toward the siege against their sacred place/

 

under the moss arches of our maple trees/

We surrendered, lowered our held hands/

that shrivel and shrink;  These sterile days/

want and waste like an unhinged prostate./

 

 And then, a fall or leap from the low branch—/

a Goliath of her kind strapped in red crest,/

draped in sable cape.  Her helmet is not her salvation;/

Father wrapped her tongue around her brain for that—/

 

to save her in all her hammering at dead things./

Venus stands on the grass grounded by our feet/

until Mars swoops down and they walk on wet green/

trying to remember the One who gives wings./

 

She flies off to the hazelnut to gather supper,/

I imagine for the other who, perhaps,/

still desperate for respite, stops to play peek-a-boo/

with us at our pole light.  Eager to escape/

 

this poet’s play— but alas, not before he’s reshaped;/

The smudge of smoke at my bones,/

he flies—black and red ember

under swells of foamy-white sky.

 

The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.  Paul the Apostle