Animals and things make languages; through us
the universe talks with itself. - Octavio Paz
He slices me from sleep with roller-ball
sonatas, vaults from vane to chimney,
flinging rapiers of sound to pin
his kingdom's fringe, then squats
and sings his scissors at the moon.
He trills words of birds he's never heard,
lyrics learned by ancestors, sewn inside
his brain. Close-beaked colleagues
crouch on ragged branches, mutter
that it's midnight, not a foggy dawn.
But he still unspools notes of warning,
mocking death, his rivals, human dreams.
Historian of squandered species, shaman
of lost ballads, he knows one day we’ll come
to him and ask What was the bluebird's song?
He tracks her along the edges of the zoo's adobe
walls, tucks his head inside each time he butts
her shell; his shoveled underlip nearly spills her
on her back as if his would-be bride were a rival
he must tip to die by slices from the sun.
She scuds through skid marks in the mud,
slows where they've waltzed before, never
wheels to confront him with her vicious beak
and claws nor vanishes inside her shell to make him
contemplate the turtle paradox of outside in.
He feels their caravan veer downhill, hefts
his bulk atop her crescent spine, powers
his raspy shell along her sun-baked tiles.
His flippers vainly clench her sides, churn
toward her core as if through force of will
he'd pin this rolling wave between his fins,
clasp her steady for one last plunge
to freedom in the sea.
He plants his hind feet on the ground, flares
his armadillo organ, finds the open envelope
inside her undulating hull; then like an ancient
shell-bound man, ecstatic eyes in a haggard skull,
he shudders, gasping with each thrust.
Wizened old Lothario, empathic concubine,
obeying Darwin's last command to these doomed
prisoners trapped a thousand miles from home.
Shedding clothes and thoughts of five
volcanic years, we clutch like newlyweds
on the lawn beside our pond, merge sun,
breeze, sex, good dope. We shudder,
roll apart, reach back, entwine.
My mind begins to waltz toward sleep....
Suddenly she giggles, clambers to her feet,
sways her naked body toward the pond.
Down a long cerebral corridor a fogged
voice shouts She's too stoned to swim!
You're too zonked to rescue anyone!
Desperately I launch myself: Arthur
gently tackles Guinevere; pinning her
on sloping ground, I fill her ears with kisses,
try to muffle siren voices calling from the pond.
Our struggles have begun again, she
marching dauntless toward her dreams,
I hanging on to those I hope we share.
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