20

The starling pipes its pizzicati
From the heart of the brambles
Like an electric feed, under a tap.

The brier hums as the earth
Hums and the resonance is sweet
With dull, cavernous ostinato.

There is music in the heart's casing.
Constellations bruise the far dark,
A bright splash of tambourines.

19

In the red-brick bed half in the lee
Of the library, half in the road,
A bush wrestles with the wind,
Multifoliate arms tussling gently
With the air and amber light
And crushed, exhumed soda cans
Cobwebbed in the reaching leaves,
Some cans and stubs like windfall
At the toenailed roots. Wind
Seems to hatch jostling up out
Of the crown of straining buds.
As if the air, congealed, had
Spiracled green into the earth.
Air grows through the foliage
Thoroughly, as through an organ,
The amber light suspiring its form.
Somewhere a capillary opens up
In red darkness like a lotus flower.

18

The bird articulates upon the air.
Bone frame and the pinioned quills
That speak a mass beyond the frame,
The back's piano-strings puckering,
Tensile, as it beats—against
The fall. An angel is a marionette.
As time is only found in motion,
Motion necessary even in stases
Of the most fundamental particles
—Even quarks falling in the dark
Beat between possible manifestations—
So the falling skeleton is soft
And articulate in its soft motion
As it falls, borne up on the air—
The air manifesting bones—no strings.