A loose handed emblem,
of folded thoughts,
Loss is weaponized in enchanted red,
Wrongs corrected stemming from the
blissful bare signed gawky individuals.
Homage backtracked and renounced
Barely earnest calls for a curious fathom-ability
Heaven bound birdlike shadows,
Bright light gagged and janky,
Found little finger blood tacked to the earth.

The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales’
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

Upon the angle of its shade
The cypress stood, self-balanced high;
Half up, half down, as double-made,
Along the ground, against the sky.
And we, too! from such soul-height went
Such leaps of blood, so blindly driven,
We scarce knew if our nature meant
Most passionate earth or intense heaven.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

We paled with love, we shook with love,
We kissed so close we could not vow;
Till Giulio whispered, ‘Sweet, above
God’s Ever guarantees this Now.’
And through his words the nightingales
Drove straight and full their long clear call,
Like arrows through heroic mails,
And love was awful in it all.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

O cold white moonlight of the north,
Refresh these pulses, quench this hell!
O coverture of death drawn forth
Across this garden-chamber… well!
But what have nightingales to do
In gloomy England, called the free.
(Yes, free to die in!…) when we two
Are sundered, singing still to me?
And still they sing, the nightingales.

I think I hear him, how he cried
‘My own soul’s life’ between their notes.
Each man has but one soul supplied,
And that’s immortal. Though his throat’s
On fire with passion now, to her
He can’t say what to me he said!
And yet he moves her, they aver.
The nightingales sing through my head.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

He says to her what moves her most.
He would not name his soul within
Her hearing,—rather pays her cost
With praises to her lips and chin.
Man has but one soul, ’tis ordained,
And each soul but one love, I add;
Yet souls are ****** and love’s profaned.
These nightingales will sing me mad!
The nightingales, the nightingales.

I marvel how the birds can sing.
There’s little difference, in their view,
Betwixt our Tuscan trees that spring
As vital flames into the blue,
And dull round blots of foliage meant
Like saturated sponges here
To **** the fogs up. As content
Is he too in this land, ’tis clear.
And still they sing, the nightingales.

My native Florence! dear, forgone!
I see across the Alpine ridge
How the last feast-day of Saint John
Shot rockets from Carraia bridge.
The luminous city, tall with fire,
Trod deep down in that river of ours,
While many a boat with lamp and choir
Skimmed birdlike over glittering towers.
I will not hear these nightingales.

I seem to float, we seem to float
Down Arno’s stream in festive guise;
A boat strikes flame into our boat,
And up that lady seems to rise
As then she rose. The shock had flashed
A vision on us! What a head,
What leaping eyeballs!—beauty dashed
To splendour by a sudden dread.
And still they sing, the nightingales.

Too bold to sin, too weak to die;
Such women are so. As for me,
I would we had drowned there, he and I,
That moment, loving perfectly.
He had not caught her with her loosed
Gold ringlets… rarer in the south…
Nor heard the ‘Grazie tanto’ bruised
To sweetness by her English mouth.
And still they sing, the nightingales.

She had not reached him at my heart
With her fine tongue, as snakes indeed
**** flies; nor had I, for my part,
Yearned after, in my desperate need,
And followed him as he did her
To coasts left bitter by the tide,
Whose very nightingales, elsewhere
Delighting, torture and deride!
For still they sing, the nightingales.

A worthless woman! mere cold clay
As all false things are! but so fair,
She takes the breath of men away
Who gaze upon her unaware.
I would not play her larcenous tricks
To have her looks! She lied and stole,
And spat into my love’s pure pyx
The rank saliva of her soul.
And still they sing, the nightingales.

I would not for her white and pink,
Though such he likes—her grace of limb,
Though such he has praised—nor yet, I think,
For life itself, though spent with him,
Commit such sacrilege, affront
God’s nature which is love, intrude
‘Twixt two affianced souls, and hunt
Like spiders, in the altar’s wood.
I cannot bear these nightingales.

If she chose sin, some gentler guise
She might have sinned in, so it seems:
She might have pricked out both my eyes,
And I still seen him in my dreams!
- Or drugged me in my soup or wine,
Nor left me angry afterward:
To die here with his hand in mine
His breath upon me, were not hard.
(Our Lady hush these nightingales!)

But set a springe for him, ‘mio ben’,
My only good, my first last love!—
Though Christ knows well what sin is, when
He sees some things done they must move
Himself to wonder. Let her pass.
I think of her by night and day.
Must I too join her… out, alas!…
With Giulio, in each word I say!
And evermore the nightingales!

Giulio, my Giulio!—sing they so,
And you be silent? Do I speak,
And you not hear? An arm you throw
Round some one, and I feel so weak?
- Oh, owl-like birds! They sing for spite,
They sing for hate, they sing for doom!
They’ll sing through death who sing through night,
They’ll sing and stun me in the tomb—
The nightingales, the nightingales!

There is a wildness still in England that will not feed
In cages; it shrinks away from the touch of the trainer's hand,
Easy to ****, not easy to tame. It will never breed
In a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.

Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk
Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make -
We, hedge-hogged as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke
As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.

A new scent troubles the air -- to you, friendly perhaps
But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell.
To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps,
And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.

I never thought of fragile as an insult until I saw the way you spat it through clenched teeth
"God you're so ******* fragile"
hissing barbed wire insults like they'd cut your tongue if you held them in any longer
before, I thought of fragile as the ultimate compliment
a sign that my concave stomach was home to fingerprint bruises
that you were afraid to hold me too tight lest I break
but then I heard it dripping slow dark molasses off your tongue
coating every syllable with thick syrupy tar

it didn't make sense to me that your voice,
petal soft and pitched for laughter
accustomed to slurring my name on dizzy nicotine breaths and over crackling long distance calls
could wrap its fingers around my lifeline and
crush it
until long after I chose to stop being your answering machine sounding board yes man lap dog

you never cared about my hollow birdlike bones or the blooming violet footsteps beneath my eyes
you said I was too ******* fragile
that my eyes were leaky taps and you had no plumbing experience
that my heart was a pincushion voodoo doll and you didn't know how to protect its satin softness from daily wear and tear
I got hurt too easily and playing tag with someone else's insecurities isn't fun

I never thought of fragile as an insult until you choked it out from behind your own iron voice box
and I realised it wasn't so much an insult as a burden
now there is leather binding forming around my cotton stuffed heart
and I'm doing my best to tighten the valves in my tear ducts
I'm still fragile
But it's not your job to hold me together anymore

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

-Elizabeth Bishop

tuck my face behind the camera
myself in the shadow of the corner
colors slashed on paper
fingers raw from the strings
my eyes heavy lidded,
I never knew that self-deception was such an art
or that my inner critic
was my greatest enemy

embrace change?
I always have

Now my throat sighs and misses joy
My limbs do not celebrate,
they yell to me
too quietly
my brain runs the show
It has run down the tracks
This is sly flirtation with death
stop talking

I want to listen to the water and the trees,
I am paralyzed here,
fear for the future

pathetic
screams the monster

pick myself apart at the seams
something birdlike and cryptic
but not beautiful

Do you feel the strength?
In your birdlike chest and your bloated stomach?
The urge to glut yourself on beer and vittles.

Chips and guacamole.
*******. This is delicious.

But what should we do - Eat
Or should we abstain in
The middle of the night?

I’ve had a few beers since
The couple margaritas,
But I have no chance stopping
‘Til the shows have ended.

There’s more I need to know.

The workman told you to bury a curled dark lock

Of your dead baby’s hair in the earth,

A quiet offering to a quieter god

You spent several months weeping to the sky

Your small hands curled into your white frock



Work was left unattended in your colorful house

No food on the stove,

No boiling salt fish, or softened dumplings in murky white water

The pungent smell of cured fish filling the quieter home

The home, austere and shrinking into the long street

Your helper comes to do all this

Your children understand in their small ways



You covered the lock of dark hair with fresh dark soil

Palm fronds wave in the wind

Salty sea air kisses your wet skin

Tears make tracks on your cheeks like a map pointing to

Nothingness, like a page of a book with words of moroseness



Once you had my mother, birthed her into a world of noise

The sure and strong hands of the matriarchal mother,

Your mother, who’d delivered more babies than she’d had her numerous children

Then you cooked, you toiled, swept the veranda with your broom

Left the buried lock of hair in the locked cabinet of your mind



Now, when I make the saltfish, I do it with stilted preparation

My hands form lumpy misshapen cornmeal dumplings

I fry the little ***** of dough for too long, they come out dry

I pop one into my mouth and chew

There, the fragrant smell of your perfume,

Sweet lull of your voice, your birdlike hands.

Darkness falls upon the land
the time is finally here
Chirps now belong to crickets
And blind birdlike beasts appear
A couple bound by cobweb shackles
Bathe in nighttime’s crooked smile
Whilst weaving in the shadows
The captors wait a while
Sounds of leaves from dying limbs
Dance deftly on the midnight breeze
No life within their brittle veins
Forever strangers from their trees
Natures waning lunar grin
Is concealed  behind a haloed cloud.
Who knows what sins that it commits
Behind its wispy shroud?
Stars look down intently
With sinister twinkles in their eyes
Spies that stalk the witching hour
Corrupting faultless skies
An owl perches on a twisted giant
Whose Wooden arms stretch out
It searches with its focussed gaze
For creatures scurrying about
Whilst The shielded hedgehog wanders
Foraging the ground
It’s weapons at the ready
For any predators around
minions retreat to their houses
And with a final smirk
Nights guardian begins to fade
And the sun begins it’s work

They gave me the wrong address when I was sent to boarding school this year.
Maybe it was the receptionist’s scaly hands that shook a little when she wrote it out, or the skies pouring out their sorrows onto my head.
Nevertheless, I’ve definitely been at the wrong school.
The boy at the end of the hall is always playing with fire and smells of ash, dark cedar and benzene, but he’s never burnt himself once.
There’s a set of twins, upstairs in another dormitory, who always flood the bathrooms, and all their clothes smell vaguely of salt and mildew and pebbles, and I think I can almost see the ocean in their watery blue-green eyes.
On the rare occasion that I find myself wandering near the lake, I can’t help but feel watched, not from above or behind as would seem natural, but from below and ahead
All the first year students I know swear on their lives that the walls and stairs move to trick us, or bring us to our destination faster depending on one’s luck.
My rhetoric professor’s eyes droop and film over during lectures and he scarcely moves millimeter from his statuesque place at the podium; yet he never fails to catch the slightest indiscretion or misplaced gesture from a student.
Meanwhile, the choral director’s ears are said to be as pointed as her canines, and her hair to be of the deepest black and violet.
I’ve growing suspicions about the gardens in the back of the kitchen, all tangled over and wreathed in what seems to be an ancient species of briar, though I’ve never seen a rose bloom, nor the gardener cease from his endless pruning.
Sometimes, I’ll catch a glimpse of insect-and-birdlike creatures flitting around the windows, and the moths around here seem rather foreign, though I’m assured the difference in flora and clime requires differences in adaptations.
The older students oversee the halls with the kind of aloof confidence built from familiarity and practice, and laugh easily about missing articles of clothing or assignments, as though a mischievous spirit or creature had nicked it. They, too, seem to disappear around twelve o’clock, not to be seen again until tea time.
There’s a section of the library which seems to positively seethe with darkness and cold, and only the bravest and boldest dare ask for entry.
And oddly enough, after a rather jostling ride by rowboat to the gates at the beginning of the year, the headmaster greeted us all by name and only drew a blank once, at mine.

she likes to play rhythms
on the toughened bones
a little lightly in the dusk
and she doesn't wait
for the shadows to clear from your eyes, she knows
shadow hides beauty too

she likes the sounds
of blood pumping through body
and hearts lifting
in joy, ecstasy, the fluttering of birdlike emotion
uncontained and yet enclosed

she is the still small voice
& she doesn't give wisdom
    she gives experience
and lets you learn on your own
because in the dark of the soul
there is the pearl you seek
the toughened bones
yielding to you now, not fear

I see myself in her...

Back when I was made of ice,
Every slice and bite precise.
Grandmother's collarbones like
Soft skin cut by knives; birdlike.

I see myself in her...

The treadmill is her best friend.
Against herself, she contends,
Stuck in a world of pretend.
Her own skeleton: her friend.

I see myself in her...

Grandmother chilled to the bone.
Present summertime unknown.
She's carving her own tombstone,
Out of her sharp hipbones.

I see myself in her...

Was that how they looked at me?
With confusion and worry?
Was I the storm on the sea?
Or the dark depths underneath?

know what is gone
and what is beyond the dandelion veil

know what is just out of
reach, something you can just barely taste on the 

tip of your aching 
tongue

you're a whole-headed nightmare
some rare birdlike enigma 

flapping through the warm night
like godspeed, glory, send us away to some place we've never known

once, you told me my poetry was too sad
and if you were just there for me

maybe we wouldn't be a fire
of burning feathers

your bones
are my bones

and isn't that enough?

breakfast with my mother
is now a song of
tapping,clinking noise
as the tremor in her hands
grow beyond the medications
control

she will be 85 within month
and has become small and birdlike in appetite

conversations have become
vocal exercises in loud short
projections
but she is not deaf
the world has just stopped
speaking clearly

her eyes
have seen so much,
her heart
has encompassed both
great joys
and deep sorrows

the sharp cutting edges of
her mind
are now becoming
butter knifes
it saddens me to know
her mental acuity
is dwindling like yarn
unraveling
to pool in a
muddled mess
of colour on
the dusty floor

i watch her
over my coffee cup
we are so
different and disparate
i once truly believed
my self
to be anothers child
our personalities
were so divided by lifes spectrum
but as i muse now
as a mother myself
watching her
it comes to me
if i am just an inkling
of her strength and grace
then i am an amazon
incarnate
incarnate

father
son
I saw them ****
out of hunger
the angel
could prepare
angel

-

it is wholly birdlike
the thought
that brings oil
to god

-

the sleeping alien
is not without
its headless
astronaut  (the first thing

-

one sees
hallucinates

You offered me your hand,
In fear I stepped away...
Who could ever truly want
An empty piece of clay?

And that's all I was...
Till your love shaped me.
Into a birdlike form,
Finally I was set free.

Except I wasn't.
So much held me down.
Not happy with so little
My smile turned to frown.

Everyday you reminded me
What made me who I am
And eventually I smiled again
As I started to understand:

Even if I shattered into a thousand pieces
Having you  around will always be enough.
If love were to be considered a crime,
Is it one we are both guilty of.

In the weeks leading up to your death there was no fire in your lips and no water in your eyes and you seemed happy for a turn so I let it be; when you licked into my mouth and it felt like feather candy, like I’d ticked off all the right choices, no red lines and I thought that we were safe. As you curved under the inside of my birdlike wrists and fed me praise, kisses where you projected cuts I had no heart for sight and but knots to stomach, that you loved me a little bit. I loved you less than a bit, then, but maybe it was always like that. I wake up to your shoes strung on a wire and that is fine but; i see you strung on a wire and things are not fine.

deep, quiet and soft
he puts my soul to sleep
like the sun, as it dips over the hill
and my heart, like the moon, it rises

contained, timid, calm
this brittle branch
a twig beneath my foot
his fragile, pressured posture
he seems a birdlike thing until he

sparks- snaps
across the room
lightning on a hot summer day
unexpected, and
explosive, and
beautiful,
that bright, electric beam

Female Conversations

She talks in stacatto, stenographical bent
Flowing along without pause
Her mind flits from one thought to another
Avian style in a birdlike frame of ideas
Rapier fast in her intent
Before I can tune into her words
The subject’s changed again
Lost in the progress of the process
I frown in puzzlement
But she’s moved on
And when I finally comprehend
She speaks of something different
And now I’m totally lost
But laugh at her commitment
A lateral thinker to the last
I feel as if I’m drowning in
The ocean of her mind
But she is swimming fast to shore
She’s left me far behind

Lances of evening sun run through trails
Left spearheads of gold behind water rails.
The dene smell that came from a hawthorn on
The turn, had lost all its putrid scents
Of spring. Blown in the night, echoed
By the corpses of snowberries, marble
Spoils of fungus adorned the rorqual’s throat
Of ridged bark on the trunk of a fallen
Tree. Two blackbirds in a drunken squabble
Over fermented windfalls, were just missed
By a pushchair where a low flying toddler
Extemporised words into birdlike cries.
An umbrella was caught up and fluttered
To dry its wet wings like a cormorant;
As mopheads in the shrubbery tumbled
From sky hydrangea to rhubarb crumble.

Birdlike spirit beyond confinement
Emergence from within flesh, exuding
Lithesome dancing fire, alive and brilliant
In some elsewhere plane of existence
Even though a string that begins from here
Veils of human blindness diminishes that
Energy, souls die when shells lie, or drown in fear.

If there’s nothing more beyond this passing
Nights starless, sky without flight, love’s lacking...(Light)

Who touched my pain?
And it became flower,
Who bestowed upon me
Long awaited shower?

Who played on a flute?
So melodious entertaining,
This gypsy mind of mine
Smiling as cloud's silver lining.

From the brink of gulch
Who seized my hand?
And I invented myself
On a fabulous island.

Look! How shamelessly smiles
This yellow birdlike mind,
Happiness is flying with clouds
Letting grief weep behind.

Rain of Love is falling in mind
So sweet melodious,
All happiness is flying in my sky
So bountiful spontaneous.