Ornithology

...

like a bird that
invisibly wakens
and feeds its
unborn young
at midnight

when no one can
know whether things
as they are
go on

-Inger Christensen, Alphabet

...

collection

i told you everything once, everything that i knew. it was winter then. it is winter now. this weak earth year in which i put my head on your lap and found birdsong. a nesting of.

you woven tendon by tendon. crepuscular. shouldering one hemisphere.

what love is bough then horizon. this love is. this love.

fledgling. wing. onomatopoeia. the flight of you.

everything spoken. then nothing to speak of.

fog reminds me of you. dawn does. every shimmering of night.

the first opening is exhausting. then torn and scabbed over. there is no pliancy to the flesh. there is no flesh to. this bird is a wounding. this bird is no bird at all.


distribution

to cull sky. to cull anything. this misapprehension of.

there is a white stubbornness to daylight. to winter. to migratory sight. i flew across an indefinite expanse. i drew myself proximate to you.

the field is brown grass, rotted fruit, a haze of light. the field is filled with longing. every field. every page. every season. nostalgic for.


speciation

parapatric. to be adjascent. narrowly so. there are days when i have a glimpse of. the angularity of your clavicle. your radius. the featherless hues.

it takes immense force to distance species. to differentiate. it takes the earth’s shifting plates. it takes a lifetime to.


phylogeography

strewn across and through. these bits of birchbark and willow. these remnants of. what was once nest and nesting is wind and desertification. the genetic drift of you.

everywhere there are markers. mitochondria. the matrilineal evolution.

what can be told and retold. what can mean only in past tense. how we are splintered and shaped. the vicariance event.

i would narrate everything according to geologic shifts. the ferocity of a sudden river. the brutish thrust of mountain range. but we are distanced by nothing other than cacophony. neither isolate nor contiguous. a flurry of birds.

too human to sit still for the endless rotation
a room full of bodies who
crave the interiority of every space
the birds burrow under wings
heat themselves in the sparse leaves of winter
if not windows then what to call the exterior
your face so strange and yet this familiar skin
we live so many lives simultaneously
who can discern known from unknown
calling everything by names learned at birth
make your palm a sword
severe the illusionary umbilical
breach the sheath of this world