A BLUE JAY SIMPLY MEANS HIMSELF
—for CHP
We found his blueness speckled
and shaking on the concrete patio—
what about the solid house struck him so vividly
as open space? A home
seems sealed, a green
crypt for private lives projected
screen to screen, or a new nearness to the sun, justly
ripens a table of the season's last apples
under one skylight a stupid, stupid beauty
who broke himself suddenly, how
natural
this wide-eyed reflection into absence atoms plucked
loose (a door, a window, a shocked birdwing)
and eking messages from worldly
things—mesh, bone, glass
enclosures for our every self—
Did he see it coming?
He did not. Or,
he did, but was a betting bird.
Do you see your face
in the animal kingdom? No, though I wish.
Do you make a terry cloth bed
for your own craven frame
in a cardboard box and place
it on the compost bin? To wait.
I do.
For what? Inhumanity to arrest us.
At first, I thought he'd recollect the treetops—
be on his way—inexhaustible unlikeliness,
correct order, assembled letters that is to say:
Stupid, stupid beauty. Ask me again:
How's your heart tonight? How soon
is too soon to weave an indigo nest
from his feathers and my hair?
The beats amass, resembling sloshed
questions, but heaving with their opposites answers eaten from within by endless fire—
I can't tell you what to make of it—
his body carried away one dark night
in the mouth of an orange cat.
TYPO
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