Birds from All the Days You’ve Lived

The wind drew its long hair across the bedroom floor,

but the bedroom was outside now, as the houses were scattered

and the floors of the houses were splintered, and the windows

were out there in the field, where windows are nothing

but the wind, whose long hair had been dyed gray

by the rivers it had moved through. And so we could no longer

read in the dim light with a cup of tea.

And so we could no longer listen to music

in the morning at the dining room table, ignoring

the newspaper’s nothingness and sales-events, and we could

no longer talk to the gesture, we could only

imitate the faces. The wind’s hair was freshly washed

but it wasn’t yet braided.

                                                I was walking up the mountain

behind you who were talking about the stones you’d visited

up here and over there, back behind that clump of trees—

stones that held the birds that must have been flying

before there was anything like us, flying overhead

before the rules were made, singing and flying,

birds that were caught now. It was a field of boulders.

So we sat there through the afternoon, we dozed there, and when we woke—

the birds were everywhere; they had long strands of hair

in their beaks, there were so many birds I couldn’t move

without touching feathers, and when I moved

the birds flew up, casting darkness, and then

they settled down again. You were crying, pulling out your hair

and holding out your hand so the birds could take the strands

and fly off. They are not birds with names, you said,

when I started to thumb through our guide book; they are birds

from all the days you’ve lived, birds from so far back

inside you the days themselves have vanished. They still live there,

way back inside you, and when we clap our hands

they’ll fly back inside, though it will look like they’re flying up

into the sky. You clapped then and watched,

sitting on those warm rocks, that held themselves more still

when we were sitting on them than they did as we walked away

up the mountain, where we camped beside a waterfall

that rushed past so loudly

we had to gesture to be heard.

The Lesson

We all know stories of people who’ve turned into things

like trees, who woke up as an insect or a bear,

a river or a whole field of flowers.

And of course we’ve heard stories of people turned to ashes

and snow—snow falling, snow covering the ground

in deep drifts we could tunnel through, almost disappearing there.

One winter the snow was so deep in our town

we had to climb out our windows and up

to the surface, a vast expanse with just

the top branches of a few tall trees sticking through.

If we fell through the crust, we might tumble through the white

too deep to climb back out. There were birds in mid-flight there

and dogs standing still, as though the snow had caught them

in a flash. But when the snow melted, years later,

everything returned to normal, though the rivers

were swollen at first with dogs and debris.

There were ponds in the woods for a few weeks; they became

fields of flowers when they vanished, full of buzzing bees

The Measured Breathing

And so I understand, at least for a moment,

how something and nothing can sometimes be reversed,

as I understand nothing: The black in a crow’s wing

works like my own deepest sleep when I wake

beyond mere self, that black like the waves

lifting their shoulders in a sudden swell of memory

or just a sudden swell. If everything we needed

were real, those delicate yellow-bellied birds

might fly through this thicket without brushing anything

and I might come home to a house full of absence

and meet all the people I’ve loved, sitting there

in the bodies they had then, but stuffed now with straw,

propped up and grinning. As my body too

is stuffed with dry grass, which pokes through my clothes.

I was hungry and you fed me—just enough to survive

until I was only what I am now, disappeared

into the music behind all this sound,

as the trees are connected to the trees of their past

through roots and branches and leaves—without thinking

anything we’d ever recognize as thinking,

Another Kind of Secret

He had walked the empty beach for miles,

gathering driftwood branches, interesting

shapes and contortions.

But now he’d grown tired, so he put the bundle down

and stepped in for a swim. And though he waded far out,

the water didn’t deepen beyond his waist,

so he kept walking, until he’d stepped up

onto a sandbar, almost out of sight,

beyond which the water dropped off, dropped deep.

He could see large fish swimming there, creatures

with dog-and-bird faces, with ravenous eyes,

pink-fleshed and grunting, too large to swim

into the shallows he’d waded through.

The winds had picked up, and he wondered if maybe

he should swim out there, leap out, just to see what

might happen, before the darkness fell

and the houses in the dunes started filling up with fireflies,

as though they were dreaming, which they did every night now,

though few people noticed. Instead he turned back

and waded in, grown chilly, and walked home empty-handed,

so he could tell stories about

the driftwood he’d gathered, and the fish he’d almost swum with.

And what about the fireflies? No one would believe him.

He was almost naked. That beach glowed like the moon.

Some Days Just Feel Like

the book I continue intending to read
or the rhythm I blink with my eyes, or the moons
in my fingernails as I scratch your back
and look out the window beyond you, into

a wilderness of bushes we planted just a year ago,
now filled with purple berries and lizards
the length of my finger, the guide book full
of useful lies, like the color of the lake 

we intend somebody to live beside
or the river that flows beneath our house,
full of transparent fish we eat
sometimes when we curl around each other

too tightly to sleep, or wake in an unfamiliar
outskirt of our lives, where the accents are leafy
and windblown and full of useless gestures
like free improvisations without

melody, stories that flesh no plot,
or books we could intend to read
for years--until our lives are separate
from our bodies, and we are everywhere.

Romance

She talked about the faces we've memorized so well
we no longer see them.  She looked at me, squinting,
and wondered which self might be irrelevant
in this colorized landscape, where birds fly in no clear
pattern, like feelings. And doesn't the sky pale
each time we look up, and every time we mention blue?
So I imagine caves, she said, and so I breathe
cool air as we walk down into dripping earth,
wondering how deep we must go before there's only dark,
before we've vanished. Could we understand our bodies
well enough to see, could we wake the senses
we've never even thought about, to light our way down
where creatures have no use for eyes,
down where creatures are more pale than air,
down where we might even make our own light
and see.  So why not practice breathing
with our bodies, until we can swim as far down
as we might desire, hollow out our thoughts
until we are light enough to fly, unfold
our wings like black umbrellas, and flap
unself-consciously, thinking sky or wind,
the self that is all self, make an adequate
language from the center of everything, and sing?

Specialist

He said he could hear what people were saying
in cars on the highway
even when they were blasting their radios.

He told me he could recognize my heart beat
as soon as I walked into his office, even
while I was sitting in the waiting room and he was
treating a patient much sicker than me.

He said he could hear the unexplored terrain inside:
huge fields no human had visited, with birds
rising just above the tall grass,

gliding there, landing, singing in patterns
that always sounded new, and in harmony. He scowled
as he stared off into space, then told me the woods
on the other side of that field were full
 
of owls the size of our children when they’re learning
to talk, which is huge for a raptor. Then he smiled
and opened his arms for a hug, so he could 
feel those secrets I still couldn’t tell
and sense which flowers would heal me.

 The Father

Yesterday, my daughter came home 
carrying a wing she had fashioned in art class,
as tall as I am--which is not very tall
for a person but huge for a wing--built
of wire and wax paper that looked like skin,
and hair she'd cut from her classmates' heads
and glued down. No feathers. That was one of the rules,
she told me, we have to make wings without feathers,
that strap onto our arms. Then we're supposed to fly,
or pretend to, while our friends imagine birds
and draw us way up there. And then we'll draw them  too.
When I tapped the wing lightly it sounded like a drum.
It's beautiful, I told her, and then I went inside
while she strapped the wing on and started running around
the yard, lopsided for a bird: one wing
only makes a person fall over.
So I helped her build a second wing, but it didn't match,
which was all right by me, since I didn't really want her
flying anyway, at least not without
protection: a parachute, or a net to break her fall.
I helped her fail, though both her wings are beautiful.
Maybe they are beautiful because they don't quite match,
I suggested over dinner, unconvinced myself.
She scowled. And then she smiled. Later we went out-­-
after the dew had fallen--and tried
to lift spider webs from the trees without
spoiling their symmetry. These will staunch a wound
better than a band-aid, or a cotton ball, she said
as dusk fell around us, like fragrance or a breeze.
I wanted to ask her what wound do you mean,
as though I might staunch it myself, but she was
holding a web suspended in her hands,
like air, or like nothing, and passing it to me.