with lines adapted from “The Song of Songs,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle
Red eyes on a red-feathered head seem not to be watching
or seem to be watching and are not,
self-camouflaged, unreliably witnessing the
war cries of the Hoop-hoop rippling visibly up the body
adrenaline firing cut-throat against the rope
of the larynx unbalanced in fits, a scream
that calls the fire-fly off the fire-fly, you do not hear it, Devil Finch,
fit to survive obliviously
appetiteless, instinct has left you listless
on an electric wire in which
500,000 megahertz course toward
the door-knob, glibly static.
Lack says you want this.
Hearing of a red without flux, suspiciously red red at which light turns and goes
back to its source A red field on a map of which the legend says:
red Draw me after you, let us make haste. Red has brought me into its
chamber My mind goes red at the thought of you, love You woke
out of dream breathless and flushed, as if pursued for hours The quill of
the red Devil Finch: 42% red, 8% red, 50% red Hearing of it she wanted it
and as she was Queen, sent a fleet
(Dear Garden Sirs,
Does it not reflect poorly upon the Gardener that the Garden is without?
Dear Tapestry-Master,
Where does the Devil Finch nest in your design?
Dearly Appointed Chef,
I am dissatisfied.)
In rooms dark enough to rouse the listening-self
to its feet, the Devil Finch, just out of ear-reach, can be heard by those who hear-
ing “all things in the heaven” hear that nothing has been said there Nor do
leaves rustle when nothing moves them Nor has the Devil-Finch disturbed
anyone excepting how a phone not ringing reveals loneliness is disturbing
A decoy has too much
that was formed by hands
desiring to hold one
See the disinterest with which Devil Finch approaches Devil Finch
or how the hired captor abandons quest when the Devil Finch perches restfully on his issued gun;
“I never really wanted one,” he wrote his lover
“Nor am I coming home.”
Omenless in visions,
she never dreamed of one.
There were two men
dead in the morning.
It had nothing to do
with the Devil Finch
watching
nor do I believe from what I saw in Patagonia
that when an animal is killed
elsewhere
in the jungle
the Devil Finch
soon gains
intelligence
of it.
