Birds

Birds

Roosters crow all day long down here and hidden pigeon doves low each other to sleep up in the trees. They are waiting for the end ofthe world.

Back home I knew a crow with dirty feathers and a crack in its beak. It perched on my bedside at sundown and told me stories all night long about stealing shiny rings from the fat fingers of sleeping Father Time, hiding them in a hole in a dead pecan tree whose branches tangled the telephone lines.

I was a bird in a cage once, but even then you could not know me, only how my eyes flittered in the dark like stars dying and being born, revolving in some secret socket of space the universe a black hole in some great gliding vulture's eye.

That is how I will go, my cage in my talons rusting, over mountains, beyond volcanos. And you will not have thought to watch me go. But I will leave one good eye weighting in your pocket like a marble. Take it out and hold it to the light.