One Perch
There is one perch.
It holds two feet, soles of a claw,
red-skinned, bird-boned.
Thin-legged.
The weight of a long burgundy flying roach,
hard tongue auditions as a third-prong, my beak then:
a lucky fork.
If only you only knew how sweet!
Catch them before they go underground for the day.
It’s hunting hour:
cactus flower,
sip and dive,
swallow, prize.
See what we can find, just a short window before the big fire lights up the sky,
snatching shadows on its rise,
pushing clouds, big-breasted high.
Like mind now, sip, and dive.
Colibri on open blooms.
“Sugar wings” we call them,
all of them.
I sit on this here perch.
Phonic calls and claps to friends dropping down and out:
the golden ones, the deep reds, occasional blue-
blued ones diving low and wide,
nearish to the brown walking ones, wings shaking desert dust,
peet up, heels up,
hiding in their own veils of dust.
I saw a drop of dew, or two, when I woke,
licked it off my toe, firmest tongue, cut the drop in half,
and half again,
snapped it into vapor cooling beak and blood.
Looked up for a time.
I saw her and she saw me - long-limbed lumbering kind,
we’ll never touch.
But we will gaze in pink dawn light, happy for the other
that we caught the same hues.
She’s a newcomer.
I’ve been here for ages.
She sees herself in the wasp in the windows-
slapping in ego-driven and banging her head,
the curious anger “Why won’t you fight me?”
I know some of my kinds who do that, too.
We try again. And again still. Trying to recognize each other.
But I know who I am.
See, her kind, don’t know how to die,
to get enveloped in the wind,
carried without a trace,
They only leave their traces everywhere,
memorials to every step
they ever made in each life.
She’s gone to unplug herself,
the nerves tied to that electricity that only used to be owned by storms.
A kind of capture;
a piece of wire,
shiny like glints on water,
and transmit everything, including their very own thoughts-
on display for each other.
They live in tandems and clusters,
forgetting entirely the cactus flower,
blooming always and everywhere,
not just on one day like they thought.