Joseph Bradshaw from The Way Birds Become Homonyms: an Aviary Shapes / of poems / fly out of the dark.               * When I burst into a million birds so wonderfully you won't know which look like dinner and which don't. And no greeting card to the birds will stitch this skin over wilderness or even over the dread of writing someone else's poem. Because the birds arrive breathless. To whet them, drinking no alphabet, no reader's inhabiting this body, it's the other hand touching the birds asking "who or where are you." A treeful of white noise is a sufficient answer. A bird's breath is in my throat.               * To say this ocean is or is like a poem is like a fist pounding your head into the shape of a bird's, a violent soma stuttering the second person pronoun birds. When I kill you for this last time, you'll roll over, playing dead so well it seems almost real. To murder in this dirty sea, all I have to say is "you." Then The chalky birds or boats stand still Murder: also singular, no birds inside.               * What a blind bird would think is green is what I see in a bird's wing. The shadows cast in flight are shelter, the nests the bird's forgotten, fallen twigs and yellowed stems. But you cannot enter a bird's domain, nor can a passing bird enter what is, a shadow merely a murder of color. If a bird kills you at this its door, you hold your heart like a stumbling cowboy, the sixshooter gripped to the last crumbling drop. The gun still cocked. You could never ride a bird like a horse because only I can own these chapped thighs heartless and raw as a frozen bird. Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon               * you'll rescind the wind and rain, or be rescinded in a single gust. The birds will exit the poem then as frail as your Latin rescindebimini or birds will be torn open. You'll be torn open as if by a torrent of wasps, asundered like an animal who never endeavored to feel the patterns of weather. And then all your swan figurings crack, reduced to the common knowledge that your neck can never bend, beak never tear quite as well as a pelican's. I felt a bird had come true.               * The possibilities you tear out of a bird never precludes that I can see you from underwater, like baby Jessica at the bottom of the well, looking upward at the glimmer that used to be the world. If a bird sees you there it looses voice. And this we both know. You knew that silence could be as comforting and full as an overstuffed pillow. If you lay down a bird, you both fall asleep though the longer you lie, the less I can see. The longer you stay with a bird the older it gets, hair silvering. I see no possibility beyond this bird, its wings as saggy and old as a friend unrecognizable after a long separation. Like a longed for presence, and so easily taken for a wolf, the bird is mere conjecture from "pieces of the past arisen from the rubble," made to make do. Its flashing still causes a trembling in every swoop of annual return. Not even the birds know where they are going.               * Dogs under the moon howl the sea so close to you, your swoon. Watch how the hair and whiskers grow outward, drown in a soft meter birds rhyming shafts of ocean split as if a last rind unpeeling. These are the eyes of only a bird. Jettied beak open, no sundering light protrudes outward from plumes of frangible cloud. Animal only in the arms, birds drive themselves into sky speckled like a rhyme. You remain only under the moon, salt and pepper patches ungrowing like children. about Joseph Bradshaw