Behold, The Lord God Bird

For Bobby R. Harrison

Hope is a bird that lives somewhere in a swamp,
unseen but there, like the tree that falls but needs
an ear to make a sound. The jizz of such
a thing is moot without the sighting of
a second birder. Everything we see
must strangely be stranger than what we imagine.
The flocks that fly through the sky of our dreams are hardly
as weird as the common sparrow, since she was spoken
and then translated. It's the words we want behind
the dream and the voice to say them, to make
them real and really strange, but cannot speak
for the length of our tongues. Be thankful, then, an angel
sings in the form of a bird that lived in memory's
overstory for sixty years. In the voice
of a clown at the top of a cypress. Kent! Kent!
she calls, then pauses for a while before resuming
her other song that echoes in our bones as if
they were trees in an ancient forest. Knock-knock!
Knock-knock! Only more and faster.

Illustration by Blair Thornley