Someone perched bird-like knees drawn to chin feet on a fat branch
back curved like a broken arch someone was huddled on a dead tree
on a tree like old bone over water someone could find nothing at all
to praise in the cage of skin nothing in the cage of afternoon someone
ached and was empty the way the beaten sky might sometimes be just
like a bruise the way storms leave everything behind to heal itself again
to make itself into something other than a case study for the wind and
for the rain the rain falls from a height so great that nothing survives
the distance the distance here cannot even be measured someone was
watching the rain was trying so hard to solve for sorrow someone thought
she might be sorrow’s solitary bird but someone was instead the whole
damned flock thick and coming constantly apart and in the rain her nascent
her myriad wings grew too heavy to fly her wet feathers became just
another argument she had already or was always just about to lose