Bird Virtue

I withhold a poem from you—the world. I cannot 

share my secret poem. The issue: it contains

sparrows and plastic parts that crash together  

like vertebrae clicking into place, or how a vapor might

rise off the grass and hover in the clear October sky. 

The poem confuses the properties of stone and water. 

It forgets the particulars of physical proximity—that thought, 

not form, reigns in the high offices of eroticism—   

and that mere wind can induce crisis. The poem disregards

the many goats scaling the cliff face even

in rain, sediment cascading down. Victim to  

circumstance, the poem concludes that empathy 

is a handicap and that nature is the seat 

of all evil while aspiring to be composed in long 

latinate suspended sentences. Line after line chronologizing

the same descent into darkness, a tiptoe, a 

lying down in, indulging that simple, sedentary, 

anti-intellectual impulse. Self-censoring, it refuses

to be touched and known; its vicissitudinous 

American face expresses skepticism. The shame

of the poem is its sparrows—abundant

unremarkable, usurping beauty in the brush. 

One sometimes emerges, parades about the sidewalk,

is trampled by a fawn. My sparrows prove the capacity

of repetition can be exhausted. Their forsaken reverie 

offsets the sounds of the unfailing creatures. Without such 

sacrifice crumb and debris subsumes the earth—I fear 

if I showed you my sparrows all the other birds would turn 

gray, anemic, imprecise, undesirable, stale. I must 

moderate my affections—I love my name.