This morning,
the owls spoke Vietnamese.

I am not speaking metaphorically,
I'm telling you categorically,

The owls spoke - Vietnamese.

The air was a'crisp,
crickets and toads hushed
for this foreign refrain - repeated
coded over the course of a ****,
over the breathy hum
of fans drying grain.

As far as what was divulged,
well, that is mine alone.
I just thought you should know,
I'm a long way from grown.

Seasons turn the birds
like pages.
V's in the slipstream,
deny this place as habitat,
when Canadian airs
slump down in the jetstream.
Pelican pouches gone,
black tipped twirling
thermal phrases gone.
Stilt legged herons,
still and balanced on a single bone,
like prophesy, a blue note
scribbled in the margins.
Egrets, orange-beaked
and wading,
slow stepped
and stabbing,
reading slow
the ditch water
for movement,
paddling boats
of the many ducks,
wood, ruddy, mallard and wigeon,
gliding bloom algae scratchings
of summer, gone.
All the fattening
cushlings gone.
Even the Kingbird,
stout-shouldered,
Maltese,
relinquishes its kingdom,
surveyed from the fastening post,
The cunning moves Othello,
on these crisping griddled plains.
Dark-eyed Junco,
black over white,
return the wintering hedge,
to the shrivelled berries,
road grit, given seed
and stubbled white pages.
Great grays and redtails
lurk these simpler plumes
in simpler plumes,
and wait the white plunging.

In the gathering steam and sizzle,
innocence borne on the cleft tongues
and snake oiling scales of just and rust,
turn green in the enzymes -
the endtimes just months away
from release and streaming.

My god has it been this long?
Broth turned to black reduction,
caramelized,
forgotten on a back burning coil,
while I sniffed the air for musk
and cardamom,
while I taste the dirt and slick
crushed biscuits in the mat,
and for what?

Steam carries dissolution,
no two ways about it,
flavor is the concentration
of dead upon dead,
scraped up fond of burning things.

This is madness,
conflagration,
cultivated extermination,
but I reel and I swoon
and roll back repulsion
with a carnivore's lust for melting fats,
with a vegan's lust for imitation,
with a child's zest to burn ants
with sunbeams, focused
to a pinprick.

Stumbling into morning,
vague, unremarkable,
perhaps befitting a glance,
or a glancing blow to the jaw.

Stay cool in the thunder room,
soft pressures of mine
and mine alone,
impugned with the round
ticks
in a chipped cup
thick with lip
and quivers.

Vague, unremarkable,
perhaps befitting a glance
or a glancing blow to the jaw,
I must take that first uncertain
step into a quickening,
allow the hinge its creak,
allow the sun its stumbling gait,
that I, busted on the jagged even,
may return and find myself
vague, unremarkable -
alive.

Wind, don't speak my name,
no squash blossom thunder,
no snap bottom rain.

I ask but a breath on dry tinder,
if just for a moment,
tender as velveteen fumes
between whispers, before a kiss
and her slow setting eyes,
while I, remiss in attending to time
and teeth, look back to the fall of things,
to the flint and the steel of things,
into the dull spark of advents
birthed into this chair,
this cigarette, this coffee,
this rolling silence,
to know that I,
if only for a moment,
have lived up
to all that I've burned.