Broken, Open Bones

Broken, Open Bones

 On Demolished June, 1195

watercolor on paper

What poem shouldn't begin

with two juncos

trapped in a room with windows

open?

This one maybe though the hope

of that or even

the practicality is lost

if only for the simple

fact they're there already in the second

line and also because

even if it's curtains I tell you curtains

they are tangled in they're still

not giving

in or finding or able

because they're delirious

with fear, so delirious that 

the open space below the solid

not-opaque-too-opaque membrane

is a simple white blood cell

between them and their freedom.

What's the answer--if they stay

they'll bang their breasts and brains out

repeatedly, like a penitent, and it makes

for good drama to say maybe they are

just that: two penitents flown in

from their own bodies and battles

and taken up in

this little feathermachine-and and lifting it

muddy the translation

of their intentions on their death

beds until the only thing left

is fury, is the catapult let

go and the miracle however

brief of being flung at someting

solid only to have that tiny opening

a forgotten door or window

meant to let the air in fresh

the air out stale.

Fear alone has its own particular

odors.  They are pushed out through

muscle and skin and sweat.  Imagine

standing in a light drizzle of this aroma.  It falls

soft as a lost sight before it's even

caught on that it's lost, before the jump-

start-recognition that what you had is now

gone and probably forever, or forever 

enough that if you put your ear to

the wall those birds still

burst themselves open on, if you do this 

week's after their death and it's quiet everywhere,

maybe you'll still hear what it feels

like to have some of this perfume fall

on your upturned fingers and palms.  Maybe

you'll even hear it fall, and you'll raise

your fingers to the cave of your ear and let it

drip into the cave of it like bird-

song, or like other sounds that didn't

make it into this fantasy, because, right?

All poems start with juncos,

two of them, trapped.  Or in the very least

all poems start with trapped birds.  You choose

your species.  But I will tell you this for nothing:

I mean I won't charge you:

Choose your birds with care

if you can.  They will be, they always are,

in the room with you.