feather by feather

This is how the sun will come, through the window, tree, and fence. This is how the dream will turn, lead gray to bullet blue. The deed gone into remission, the seeds spend by breath and wind. This is how the dead will call, from the thin veil parted to the ink of confession. Feather by feather, bird by bird. The day begins again.

The shoulders shrug, the tendons condense, the bones sing from every break. The deep shifting soils, the tension of roots, the spider adrift in the hunt for spiders. Every story is an abrupt departure, a virus coiling in the culture, the snake always offering some fruit or another. The words all flock and migrate, shifting roost and claim. My voice always cracking against some cold end, the dismay that poetry is somehow always slipping away from the surface of the world.

I toil in the infectious abandon of duty, I work away from blood and country, every phrase another run of bad luck. I carve away at the sheer mirror, swerving off the road of reason. That feint of remembering, always something essential just out of reach. The press of wings against the sky, the painting of sweet ache into the very air. Each act an echo, a set of lines traipsing against the dawn. Every color taken as one, the crows strung thin against the empty.