Empty is a Dead Bird's Throat

Empty is a Dead Bird’s Throat, Her Song Spun Undone  on a Branch Above Her Young

Sometimes, seeing is more than open-

eyed leaning first slow to the left

then slow to the right.  It’s breathing

shallow, shallow, shallow, deep

the way water suddenly is after

you see silt and silt and silt

and then nothing but a dark throat

getting thick, getting tight

as you sink.  This is the kind

of drowning, waves in climb then decline,

that's like hot hair rising, and only 

ever smelled and never seen until

the heat has gone up under it all

to ignight the wax-fat and there is absolutely

no way out of the smoke.  When you’re finally

found you’re having as perfect a sleep

as you’ll ever have.  Sad you can't say

what you saw that spooked

you first, what stunned you into

not moving at all until the moving

was the only thing done for you

because it all has you now, as they say,

by the throat: one day you’ll be laying

up looking into the corner of the door

jamb and you’ll see some spider’s

got busy with what little traffic

there is here and the web she’s built

is tense and beyond itself pretty

and you know, as soft an eye as you got

you could follow that web until the second

coming, until trumpets, until the field

you’d waited after that accident opens up and all the dead

rise first just like they taught you

in Sunday School.  Here, now, you see

there’s as big an egg sack as you’ve

ever noticed.  But instead of Jesus

it’s third grade and a pig and a buttermilk

bath: a wash of all the sins any back

can carry and yet be glad to be rid of.

This web—straight from the back-

side to the corner, corner to corner, is

suspended (it seems, as you sit) in air

the way your feet were after a long time sitting,

touching nothing solid, after you rolled

straight over her, and, once out, looked back

at the red and cracked glass and its perfect

circle in the middle.  And the concussion

under your skull wasn’t blurring

what you could see but instead dampening

sound, like someone had come with a bell-

jar and you were watching it all

form patterns on the inside.  See it but not hear

it.  Breathe it but not be singed by it.  Hot

gall all around and you, finally,

pounding and pounding until the glass,

like the windshield, like the car

in the road, is cracked wide open

and all the spiders, tight in their little

sack of life, spill out of the throat

of the dead and get on getting gone.