The bird flies through three surfaces:
earth, water, and forgetting. But it isn’t only one
bird. Thousands, millions, browns, blues,
transparencies, rose, quiet, loud,
shallow, trustworthy, with eyebrows
like wire, eyes like something fermented
in a bottle. They yammer in crock pots.
Get into the flour and fly off looking
like odd hand signals outside the window
of a moving car. When you tell them to stay still,
they shake. When you tell them to shake,
they break an egg and spray you with yokes.
Build a white floor and you’ll find black
ink prints raced from door to door,
cabinet to cabinet, and no more croutons
for the salad come company.
They line the roads
with their wings hung like laundry
and vote minutes before the polls close.
A side of them is a square.
Another side is a circle.
Yet another side happened yesterday
when a tree fell, wherever it fell.
And each side has its infinite degrees
and infinite times, such that an eye blink
in one hundred years may be confused
for a kind word one thousand years
before the invention of transistors.
The bird turns, breaks between the branches.
It leaves black trails through smoke,
wind, earth, water, and fog. The bird
leaves us wondering at footprints,
small writings in tree skin, at how many
birds there can be in one bird,
whether any shape or collection
of shapes, colors and surfaces
will migrate into a vast animal in flight,
perhaps as massive as all matter
collected forever, and collecting
and still collecting, until the bird
blinks and we stumble and fall
into a cold lake and forget
the million surfaces of a bird.
Again.
