Karen McCarthy Woolf

My love is an aviary
of small birds
and I must learn
to leave the door ajar . . .

Are you the sparrow
who landed when I sat
at a slate table
sewing lettuces?

Webbs Wonder, Lollo
Rosso, English Cos . . .
Swift and deft
you flit and peck peck

quick as the light that
constitutes your spirit.
Yes, you were briefer
than Neruda's octobrine.

So much rain that night.
Our room is an ocean
where swallows dive.
The bubble bursts

too soon, too late, too long:
all sorts of microscopia
swim upstream, float in
on summer's storm.

The tenor of your heart
is true as a tuning fork struck
- and high! My love
is the bird who flies free.
...

after Do Ho Suh's Staircase 3
Long and complex on the palate
rage attacks the tastebuds,
a territorial robin whose wings
coruscate the epiglottis, insidious
as rust in a cut. Her jaw
has started to clamp. Remembering
is a port wine stain.
Similes are useless
on this red staircase
that ascends:
an upside down madder root
feeling its way to the sky.
She has become a connoisseur
of its avoided flavours' Titian hues.
The nose has notes of cherry soda,
ginger biscuit, sang de boeuf.
This is one for laying down:
it will keep for years under the earth.
...

spreads its branches so twigs scratch
third floor windows, pushes through cracked
glass into front rooms cluttered with books.

Every time the wish is amended, cells disperse,
subdivide, multiply. Tomorrow the wish is a horse,
a knight with its two forward one across,

his mane a scythe razing cornfields to the ground.
The wish isn't supposed to do that. The wish is out
of control. The wish can be viewed from many angles;

today it's a crow looking for soft spots to stab.
Or a tricolore to wave at the toros who charge
with muscled heads down. The wish lives

in a little silver box with WISH written on it.
The wish is big as America. The wish is totally irrelevant.
The wish is yappy as a tethered dog and industrial

in its persistence: a rhesus monkey that bares its teeth.
On anniversaries the wish smiles like a chaise longue;
its death cry sonorous as a foghorn.

The wish is as monumentally unfinished
as Gaudi's dripping catedral
and needs you, always, to be absolutely specific.

The wish purrs behind an electrified fence where
it keeps company with deer. The wish is a murmur
barely overheard. The wish. Always the wish.
...

We find you, dear Wing,
in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets,
your knuckle of raw bone
and streak of claw-white quills
torn from the socket.

A grey goose soars
up high where hot air-balloons drift
and the wind is a shape
to wrap yourself around
solid but unseen, a somersault
inside the womb;

here, folded to a cup of hands,
plump as a wood pigeon
in the long, flat January grass
you are singular and intense
like a girl breathing quietly by a window,
her just-cut hair pressed against the glass.
...

—rushes and there's no more

a whirl of empty dresses—
in this mudcracked room
palm frond feathers
helicopter
downwards
shallow roots torn
a broken bird
song explodes
on a frequency of earth and lime
too high to hear

—we haven't got—
a heart beat

—haven't got five minutes
a groan of sea
shushes up on shore

—rushes and there's no—
no ha ha ha of music
and radio
the thud of workmen
clatter of hollow poles—scaffolding
a truck in first gear
footsteps
school

an O of bells clang-
clangs across the river

and then the hush
of marble
eyes
unseen
eyes
unopened

endlessly

eyes
...