A few feet away in fuchsia, wings are inferred. She signs the air with herself so fast the whole benediction is visible, then gone, & when I look around she sits resting on the line among plastic clothes-pin—synecdoche, metaphor, or just a sense of humor? Air's ampersands, seahorses of the aether, Thomas Morton believed they live on bees, & Loranzo Newcomb, thinking to taste their nurture, went about inhaling the essence of trumpetvines. This one's an ounce emphasizing the grossness of chickadees, hinting at the design of the Concorde that used to boom out over the Atlantic each morning around 8:30, & so quick she has few effective enemies. If extremes truly contain their opposites, she & I have at least that in common, along with a life among the trees.
Copyright © 2005 by Brendan Galvin. From Habitat. Reprinted with permission of Louisiana State University Press.