After years of this posture
I felt an energy sweating up and pulsing out my scalp
that thin, unrestricting top.
It was humming and brand-new, and I feared the quick quick cravings
and turned away from the reddened glow of heat welling up within
and wanted spread hands about my open face.
I found myself worrying so much about what’s already been written
versus what’s imperative right now.
something like embarrassment, the inescapability of this state.
or maybe it’s a certain sort of boredom,
knowing I’m pursuing the wrong release,
and really wanting some new pronunciation,
the ability to meet the world with a new clip or gait.
I stood stirring in my body all ablaze
And looked around my room for what to do,
which way to turn,
what to pick up and what to put down.
whirling around so fast that I was contaminating one place with debris from another.
In this heat I accessed memories of a glass of water,
a red-penned paper, a clarinet of brassy blue shine,
the noble breast of a bird, a round pearled bite, a whistle in the air.
Oh meddlesome times with a liquid broil inside
It was fever, fever, an antisocial delirium fever.
and remarkable, how I churned about
and took seven steps and picked up twelve things and got nothing at all done.
I placed myself at the neck:
Like I wanted to be in the middle of something.
Right there, at that little tube
that neck, which it concerns me I can’t see.
I took the worked slice of paper from underneath the meat of my palms and curled it up,
or might have wedged it into a crack.
No use in etching away while my fingers were so slick with salinity.
I think that here, at the neck, there is so much to wrap oneself around, so much to do, so much to pull into your orbit if you want to draw yourself across an afternoon,
that digestion isn’t necessary
or even attempts to draw lines between
what is raw and what is cooked.
Just stay so necked, so always in the middle, letting things get swallowed and glide around and steep for a while so long that who knows what flavor they’ll take
what to do here, heavy and not right in an enclosed space.
Through the window, from atop my neck
I looked to the cardinal,
a saturated shock on the fence post outside.
I saw how easily it sat in its small spastic body,
and felt feathered comfort pressed against the skin might cushion my wrought state.
To bed.
Dreaming in hard streaks, feet pulsing from a day of slap thump walking.
Soon all the land and all the sea held me, And I rested a strange sleep,
Cursing and flapping about a Forest
With the buzz of hives and barely-there arms and a dance of wettened finger-tips.
a span of time like this is more concrete than a bare number.
Like eleven pm or nine hours or ten thousand steps.
And in this stretch I watched you twist and torque, my bird
like Carmine-winged you slapped round the ridge of the tree-tops
Falling and hinged between the knuckles of the land,
resting in its prickly palms
after your big flight. I dream, and think
I’d like you to call on me, to rest your weight on my shoulder or against my cheek.
I’d like you to sit atop my wrist and hold on, and bear witness to the world with me.
I’d like you to pinch all the words from my ears into your small beak
and translate it all to me in sharp high ticks and spits.
What is this desire to carry you along, my bird.
I know your oval body is up to more than me: and can’t be held.
It’s a wide continuum, involving the air, some speed, the trees, the time of day, wetness, errancy, temperature, Amelias voice, the color of the sky.
It is as if attempts to place your shape and taste and sound would lose direction
as you curl and coil your round chest throughout the landscape.
I want to feel you at my neck
And heave my heat into your body, let it take on the pump of my fevered state
But I feel myself unable to keep track of all the vicissitude, not knowing the right nudge.
I wonder, if you were to put your beak into an ear
if you would taste bitterness, or vibrations.
if you were to swim, small cardinal
if you would take on the habit of swallowing water
and spitting it out again.
Or if you ever turn around to go back or retrace and so on, like i do.
If your flights are always lines or ever bowed,
like the way one makes the hand move while cupping the back of a head, or a calf,
doing something round to break up all the gridding-up and gridding-out,
all the pathological pathing of lines circumscribing all around.
And in attempts to think my way into your body
and the way you might touch the world
I’m just trying to put my finger on something infallible,
to locate something solid and unwavering
But all perfect states are perfect nonsense
So I’ll just keep laying here, deep against my wettened crater;
the warmed bed, and
thin flicker, little water-bottle you, your feathers waver,
Your abrupt, probing eyes
are perched ready, flitting through the monotony.
And together, shuttle bodies, eye in eye, we’ll find messes in all places.
The anarchy of new seedlings and next spring are on our side.
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