The landscape rolls,
The page unfolds,
And letters flood the gap.

The trees entwined,
The words in rhyme,
A sentence spreads its trap.

The world can turn
But paper burns
Until it turns to black.

The birds hang dead, paired, on the hook.
Male and female, man and wife, are strung
Up in a brace of everlasting love,
Still warm. But time will soon freeze over
Freshening blood, encrust the opened eye,
Congeal warmth. And what remains is this:
A neck-to-neck unbreaking dull embrace,
The love gone cold, unbeating hearts kept close,
Reciprocating wounds, an unforgiving stare,
The silence in a breathless, parching throat,
A half-bent wing, refusing to enfold -
Time will wear love’s fingers to the bone.

Then bullet-hardened bodies take their course
And undo softly with a rising rot.

You know I promised to write,
Dropped a line last night
Hoping it might
Reach you.

But when I dropped it it fell,
Like a stone in a well,
Drowning in hell,
Couldn’t reach you.

Knuckles in eye sockets
Feel like the blindness of a saint.
Flesh on flesh,
Bone on bone.
I cannot explain
Such an incarnation:
The source, the well-spring and the fall.

I heard the shot behind the hill,
Pausing to log the dull report,
Thinking that death - or deaths – unseen
Were manifested out of sight,
Not mind. Swift shocks of rising birds
Spoke of events my mind inferred.  

A feathered body writ in flight
Spirals into closer view.
Fluttering quills, the uttering beak,
The watchful eye, the scribing claw.
But all of it has come to ground –
On the verge, a body, found

In dull and heavy silence. This
Is not the body I heard shot
But an old ****. The blood
Dried up, the eyes tight shut,
Half-open beak eternally
Clamp-locked in silent cry.