The Monkey Bird
       

I say, crow and watch it fly through the pines,
until, like a hurled inkwell, it sprawls
on my window.

Catch the scent of conversion—not the stench
of burnt feathers and flesh but the notion that this crow
is going places, arrested for now in the body convened.

Gold eyes of a mutant
stare. I stare.
Winger of wind, lingering prophet in trees—

all of us set lose to make impressions on air.

But this crow is pressed on glass. It's lifted out of the moment,
a dreamer's stop for the moment, and already a woman waits at the window,
marking the green avenues as routes of exile or arrival.

Sister with red shoes poised on your feet, can’t you see what's before you?

My mouth helplessly fills with crow. Across the leagues of sleep, I give
a limitless, underwater shout for raucousness-in-the-pines, any warning
for this cross-the-heart-of-blackness-then-see-what-happens bird

until the morphic-shift begins. A bird’s face furs to our more wizened
simian kin:
                  dream, the short-winded approach to a heart that beats in us
and once swung through the trees—the other side of the world pinned
for thought and wonder.

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Copyright © 2012 Katherine Soniat All rights reserved
from A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge
Dream Horse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission