Destiny O. Birdsong

Emeritus

Only a few degrees separate
the splotches of color on both our cheeks when I ask
if he’s read Olzmann’s theory of Guinness and motion,
Vuong’s description of the copper skies of war.
Murillo’s conversation with two sparrows.
I know enough not to ask about women.
He seizes on the birds: All the greats wrote
about birds, but sparrows are biblical and mundane.
Perhaps there should have been kingfishers instead—
such majesty there; such music! He goes on
about vacations in Sydney and the kookaburras.
Meanwhile, summer tattoos its ochre fingers
with a latticework of death masks: hammerheads flounder
on the seabed, fins folding in oil-choked water;
others swim in silver tureens on the coast.
A glacier the size of Delaware cracks loose
in the Arctic, and in the place where Wilmington
might be, a polar bear cannibalizes its cub.
Elsewhere, the mother of an unprotected species
lunges in the eyes of the law, and is euthanized
in front of her four children. Or was it two?
One grown son? Three and a fetus? And this man
of arts, letters, and no regrets except one—not taking
the day trip to Canberra—turns to my page:
I don’t understand the girl. She does nothing but play
jacks, drink Kool-Aid with a spoon, and tell her mother
she wants to be a policewoman while the mother
rubs Vaseline on her legs? There’s a message there,
but I have trouble identifying—well, it doesn’t matter.
Read Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” then we can address
what should happen to her together. At this point,
only the Vaseline is interesting. An ethnic thing, yes?
Perhaps, then, a poem from the perspective of the jar?