It was the year someone vandalized the city councilman’s car.
The paper said deer piss. Everyone is an informer in the end.
If flight paths link heaven and earth, the angels
have a web of aliases.
Burrr lin burrr lin burrr lin. Hark—
the irony of birdsong is as finely tuned
as false teeth on a dirty whistle.
There’s a warbler dressed like a Shakespearean actor.
And another like a wall creeper at a lunatic asylum.
The world is stranger than the world you know.
Burrr lin burrr lin burrr lin.
Well, hell. I’ve never been.
Out of sync with the times, I see,
like a fantaisie for flute and theremin—
Wipe out the disguises, life & contacts.
After that hippie wedding in Maine
all the birds seduced the Pope. It’s better
than suicide. The bride, Nell, doesn’t like me at all.
She’s from Connecticut. State bird: American Robin.
It’s sobering, really. I hope to sleep with her
and sing my soul to rest.
Leave proof that we were here,
soaring and elliptical before the bardo.
Put a hat on that baby, mid-dash
to the emergency exit.
Twin Cinema
The last Great Auk was killed
on Eldey Island, Iceland in
1844, which means you’re not
going to have a Big Year unless
you’re listing in the Lower 48.
When I was in Iceland I watched
a woman step into a geothermal
field so her husband could get
a better photo of her with The
Great Geysir.
The name Geysir is derived
from the Icelandic verb geysa
—“to go quickly forward.”
There were storm clouds like
a nervy flash of pubic hair. The
husband got the shot. The woman
didn’t slip into extinction through
the earth’s spidery volcanic systems.
It’s the gravitas of the chronicle,
as Artaud would say.
My ideal and fictional self thinks
that things worked out well for the woman
and her husband.
They made love.
They went to the cinema.
They had a fluency of feeling.
I suppose there was milk and woolens and laughter.
They heard trains on an island where there are no trains.
Everything went somewhere.
The fisherman’s boot didn’t crush the last egg.