February 3rd: The Canaries

February 3^rd: The Canaries

He told me they heated the heads of little pins

to put out the eyes of the yellow canaries,

the miners, that somehow they had discovered if

the birds were blind in the dark they’d sing

until they died, until their silence was the only

thing the coal would absorb or could

and the men picked their way back out
half alive. In the cages the free dead rested
and were left behind and they became
the memories in the caves of men, and on this
the men were silent as the rocks

and exhausted birds.  Doing such a careful job
with their hands, their little hot pins and fist,
then holding the cage out went farther into their mind
than their light might

reach, listening, listening, the black coal the only

ricochet and the dust covering the burnt

yellow canaries eyes and their two day straight

in the dark song and maybe of gas.  But I think it’s

exhaustion they give in to and I said so, their lungs must've
been sung straight through. And though it’s nothing like birds
and those thin shafts they're shoved into, forgive me if I say I felt

like one, a canary wide with fear song in the dark

when I was walking down the hall to your hospital

room the day after they beat you.  My head felt

as though it was being pressed on the inside with

dry cotton, my esophagus was shrinking

I was leaning against the cage in a dark only shock

can create, you know, how it dims the light for us

like some benevolent butler.  And you there

on the bed looking like a bull had hooked

you on the jaw and not let go.  On the thick stitched lip

and eye a mote of light, I mean who can contrive

that, and dust when you shuffled in your drugged

nod and you didn’t know us how could you

after such a collapse and with those eyes shut

like that... I couldn’t look.  I remember though
the skin was so blue, I had to think of those poor canaries
and the burning and the song the song that didn’t stop, how the strong

ones went two days maybe and that was it

they fell against the cold fist of dark the way

you must have, eyes first or last it doesn’t matter,

crusted as they are with blood and viscosity

when they’re put out like that.  And no accident:

I picked up the song and I pocketed it, thief that I was

and stood at the foot of your bed while you slept

not exactly dead but dead enough until you were

but that was five more years in the mine five more

years songless on and on…