I am not afraid of night.
I am…but I will not be
when the moon rises.
conversations with birds: the swan drifts
(the swan drifts over the reflection of real ruins around which an architect has arranged lake and trees:)
I am not pure enough to believe in
love, its archaic masquerade. I am
not pure enough to believe its silken
cords won’t fray but
Is there a love otherwise made? Of stone?
Its architecture, yes, toppled in weeds,
though an entablature on slipped columns
remains to frame the inorderable sky.
I could think: Marking a grave. Or
Its austere grace! What time cracks falls away
to reveal a more essential beauty.
The ruins memorialize themselves.
Two might still walk among them hand in hand.
conversations with birds: when birds dream.
When birds dream, it is of walking. In their dreams—in a meadow or a forest or a city (…ice floes, burlap of desert, carefully tilled fields lined with stones…) (…but never never the sea…)—they put one foot in front of the other for miles and miles. This lasts all night and is always exquisite.
Awake, their breasts pump like bloody hearts as they pummel their feathery selves into air. The night’s pleasure shapes their imaged souls as an upright creature whose step is proportioned in ideal measure for progress and contemplation. This image dwells—not in atmosphere nor air (and never never in the sea…)—on earth where birds’ souls, they imagine, are on two long legs released.
Xie Zhiliu
I write the word…
(Odalisque? Tightens her robe, brushes a feather from her cheek, settles down to clean sheets and
a bottle of ink. She writes the word Bird.)
…
…
my friend. the black swan.
(feathers swirl the feather bed’s sacked black swan trumpets arches his long neck squalls
mindless bird! great beast!
shakes his feathers grooms sails black feathered from the high black room.)
my friend hawk
(The hawk gazes from the window
like a saint from the door of an altar-piece.)
(Beyond, a minute wilderness.)
my friend the phoenix
(The phoenix barters plumage for matches.)
my friends (starlings)
(Starlings swarm. Thousands of sutures in an immaculate sky.)
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
