Wears pink boots over his feathers,
Knocks the Peninsula shavings over
Because he can, not a Corab, a full Arabian,
He doesn't eat the grass as much as he
Talks his way through it, his lips must grip
The strands just so, to tear the truth out
Of the ground, when it's dry like now
And the birds are somewhere else,
Perhaps a show, leaving the oak trees
Like old black men who hold the thing
Together by never reacting, just flexing
Their wizened gray bark in the sun
And letting their nodding boughs hang
Like Obsidian's jolly ball, which now looks like
A punching bag for bored, boarded horses.
A sound -- one woodpecker pleading
With the silence to be heard,
It needs its steady chirr inside the pen
Of all that can be captured
For some archival record
That even we cannot conceive of
But the bird knows, to be heard is
A service, thus one must be listened to
Even when the silence is occupied
With motorcycle crickets and Palomino sighs.
This place is like a waiting room, the most auburn sun
Filled with dappling, road apples out like magazines.
Elvis the Pinto and Dow Jones the Gypsy
Touch their heads together from neighboring stalls.
They are like two friendly but melancholy teens
Who show off their stylish eccentricities to all.
Unfamiliar birds dance with their craws
Across the branch tops. The thing that is captured,
Not the birds in all their innocence, but the ears
That make it mean, crack the code of its crackling,
Enact more memories of Earth herself, in her chair,
Restoring the Human to her breast again.
The shanty tack shacks are empty now
Though every one is full of light.
A mountain of magenta bougainvillea
Behind them like a diva, on a stage too large
For any of us to take. With pink snip Obsidian
Continues, pulls out any stalk he can nibble.
