Occasional Impressions

Gemini Twin

Dead Bird

Why is there always
when the breath & blood have dried
so much absurdly shabby, secondhand,
crumpled and tossed away
about this heap of bone & withered fleshstrips,
lustreless pointless feathers left to gather dust
and light & shadow
twisting in the sun?

How can I believe
so much malformed a bundle
with its tightpointed polished skull
sunk with impossibly large eyeshafts
(where have the eyes gone, who can tell?)
had ever blood in it to toss itself
against the wind & grip the frantic turbines
of the air
when all to see is relicts from the slaughter
of owl, cat, stone, or man or car,
or sheer contingency?

Whose living voice monotonous and unrepeatable
would jostle with a thousand others
in my indifferent ears. Only death
grotesquely mirrors singleness, deposits this
incongrous heap before me, something not-grass,
not-earth, not-stone, but dead-bird,
for me to make thin shadows of uniqueness
in these words, and wonder why I care too late
and christen it with requiem.
rdw - may 1972

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