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The Heat Bird

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A critic objects to their “misterian” qualities

I look it up and don't find it, which must relate

to the mystères in religions. Stepping across stones in the river, which covers my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle the meadow to gain height. There is a din of big wings. A crow loops over and over me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called an eagle to myself. At first you just notice a heap like old asphalt and white stones dumped

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There is a curving belly. The cow's head is away from me

Its corpse is too new to smell, but as an explanation

hasn't identified my bird. Twice I'm not sure if light wings

between some bushes are not light through crow feathers

but then I really see the expansive back swoop down

and circle up to another cottonwood and light

It's a buzzard with a little red head. You say

that's good. They're not so scarce anymore. It should

have been more afraid of me

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Fresh wind blows the other way at dawn, so

I'm free to wonder at the kind of charge such a mass

of death might put on air, which is sometimes clear

with yellow finches and butterflies. That poor heap

is all sleeping meat by design with little affect

I decide in a supermarket, whose sole mystere is an evocative creak in a wheel. Not unlike a dead stinkbug on the path, but unlike a little snake I pass over All night I pictured its bones for a small box of mine Today I remembered, on my last night you wanted to linger after the concert, drinking with other couples like a delicate dragonfly

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And I can't predict your trauma. Potent and careless

as radiation here, which we call careless, because

we don't suspect anything. Then future form is in doubt

Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium

which progressed by momentum from some original reduction

of fear to the horizon. But my son's thigh bones

are too long. I seduced myself. I thought

I'll give it a little fish for the unexpected. Its paw

moved. My back-bones are sparking mica on sand

now, that carried messages up and down

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Glass that melted in the last eruption of the

Valle Grande has cooled, and you can run

among wild iris on a slope, or fireweed in the fall

Its former violence is the landscape, as far as Oklahoma. Its ontogeny as a thin place scrambles the plane's radio, repeating the pre-radio dream At any time, they all tell us, to think of eruption as a tardy arrival into present form, the temperate crystal I still see brightness below as night anger, not because of violence, but its continuousness with the past while airy light on the plain is merciful and diffuse that glints on radium pools. I wanted to learn how to dance last year. I thought your daughter might teach me

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She did a pretty good job at elucidating something

she didn't understand and had no interest in

out of duty. She has evoked a yen for dance. Any

beat with wind through it. In an apricot tree

were many large birds, and an eagle that takes off

as if tumbling before catching its lift. I thought

it was flight that rumpled the collar down like a broken neck

but then as it climbed, it resembled a man in eagle dress

whose feathers ruffle back because of firm feet

stamping the ground in wind. The other birds discreetly

passed their minutes with old drummers of stamina

but eagles entered swept ground oblivious to other drummers

making streams of rhythm in their repetitions

until pretty soon some of the other ladies' white feet

moved to them, too, bound thickly around the ankles

so their claws look especially small

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Where I saw their fine cross-hatch was competition

not air moving through air or weather

though the water balloon she tried to dodge

as it wobbled this way and that like big buttocks

before breaking on her shoulder was rain. The rain is not important. It rains, not very often but regularly. If I am far from you isn't the current of missed events between us an invention of potency like a summer storm at night, or when I see you A throw of food and household goods from the roof to all of us became a meteor shower across fixed stars In their parallel rain I can't judge each gift's distance

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I looked to my right. Though sun wasn't yet behind

them, it was bright near each tree at the top

of the ridge in silhouette. These were precise

too, on a closer edge outside time, being botanical

I mix outside time and passing time, across

which suspends a net of our distance or map

in veering scale, that oils sinuous ligaments

or dissolves them into a clear liquid of disparates

that cannot be cleaned. Its water glows like wing bars

and remains red and flat in pools. On the way

to that town there were green waist-high meters on the plain

There was a sharp, yellow line on the blacktop

In rain it remains sharp, but its dimension below the road

softens and lengthens through aquifers. The eagles'

wingbones began to stretch open with practicing, so

luminous space in their wings showed against the sky

giving each a great delicacy in turns

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They took me to the little town where they were

working, because I asked them to take me. To my left

was an old porch with long roof boards going away

from me, on 2 X 8 rafters perpendicular to them

and the falling-down house. Light descended

to my right. Narrow cracks between boards cast

a rain of parallel bright lines across the rafters

which seemed precise and gay in the ghost town

They were outside its time, though with each change in sun

they changed a little in angle and length, systematically

They were outside the carnage of my collaborative seductions

When I touch your skin or hear singers in the dark, I get

so electric, it must be my whole absence pushing I think, which might finally flow through proper canyons leaving the big floor emptied of sea, empty again where there used to be no lights after dark

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Prosaic magpies arrive about the time ribs begin

to show a beautiful scaffolding over its volume

where the organs were. The buzzard now brings to mind

a defunct windmill with a wheel hub, but no blades. The eagle's

descending back still bears, after enough time has passed

when the event is articulate, and I know its configuration

is not mixed, or our mingling, or the “intent” of a dance

If a bright clearing will form suddenly, we will

already know of it