Bird Talk

                                                                        -for Bud Cort

I am forever looking up,
unlucky habit

under the ceiling zero, the opened cage aviary
where no bird can be ill-omen,

where if you get too high the ice sings as it breaks
around your body.

Weather-bird, foul out of custom, the beaten bush in sleep, birds
do dream, random

patterns'-worth, handed over in the augury like memory.

No Ra kingdom, no mariner's superstition
protected by Stormy Petrels, souls
of the dead ghosting
                        behind the wake's white afterlife, no
I am certain

speaking to us, from flocked heaven or hell-feathered, you decide,
where the landscape is hurtling upside down
through windfalls falling,
reams of rain,
the dying man's walking where happiness is cruel,

there, the birds are.