Fracture and Regelation Theory
Where species overlap (sympatric, simpatico), songs evolve
and diverge, no I without you
distant, or strange -- so this fallen male I hear (a female
would be nearly silent, a mere
wing flick)
low in the bush, his body's fluted drum
what sings, not the flawed wings' scrim of rain meshed
in black wire's lace, what crowding or chemicals' fine veil
twisted, trapping him (dogday cicada, harvestfly)
in flightless emergence. Late summer
is a vibration of air, the world
humming; my observation, the field
where row after row of chemically mutated
line up, pin through thorax, pin
through thorax -- My freeze
doesn't fool him; he cuts off,
stranded
far from the canopy's chorus evolution
meant him to reach by blood's
hydraulic extension inflating and
liftng his wings. As amulets of jade, secreted
under the stilled tongue, once they marked hope
for rising, the past misting away
to a scarf so transparent it
can't be seen, finer even than that cloth before the weavers' thumbs
were amputated, a crimson sari pulled entire
through a wedding ring, finer than the soul
blooding the body, that delta of iron, of rust, vein
to capillary: the rivered earth
in aerial view, dendritic map
of the valley grained in the trunk beneath the crackling
abandoned skin: Magnolia grandiflora, its own range
narrowed and pared (climate change,
glaciation) while beetles droned
after huge, moon-white flowers, acorns going off like distant
buckshot in the reservoir --
All things near
in their loss. Sun in the fist of trees, chapel bells rack up
the elegaic number while the dying goes on in un-
memorialized silence and the dead drift
into overgrown margins, scrub
of sumac and pine,
flicking their failed wings --
Buy Sandra Meek's book @ SPD or Amazon
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