I could tell by your face when you first saw me
you had the urge to leave the room. I walked
into the shelter with one eye intact, the other red
with blood vessels burst, the left side of my face swollen.
I tell you I can handle this. I don’t need to talk to anyone.
I know what to do. And I know you think it looks bad
but it really isn’t. I bruise easily. I always have.
I’m fine. I can handle this I can.
I can’t remember when I haven’t had a bruise.
It’s like falling backwards with your eyes closed,
there is no one to catch you and you never feel yourself
hit the ground. All you feel is that moment in the air,
before the ground, you hear a flutter past your head,
your bone hitting cement, but the feeling of falling
in midair feels better, so you always take yourself there,
take yourself to where you can hold yourself.

       In Memory of Lisa DeFrancis

In the morning before sunrise
A coyote runs across the highway.

Your husband gives you baths and green tea,
Candles and the wood stove are lit.

Embraced by your children,
They hold you at the window.

You see the faces of the voices
Singing to you.

Blood count numbers hum across the line.
The lines on a face in concentration.

How does the land remember the coyote,
Tracks in the dirt, juniper berry scat?

Your ashes sinking below the Atlantic’s waves.

The youngest daughter dreams on the couch,
Lingers in the room of her mother’s passing.

1.
Heavy, sudden, tingling, strange, reeling.
When your head feels funny, the dizziness
as you stand up and the fading happens.
The recognition of a certain madness?
I hear something, not voices, but senses,
no, but yes, strong, as though the beads of sweat
are real blood. Cool off, calm down, when even
the sirens are calling, you know the words,
banging the tables, rattling the windows.
Something to keep going, this word, sadness,
what is it? Letters knocking inside the mouth,
say it better, taste it, feel it congeal,
sugar sprinkled on fruit, syrup, but not sweet;
it is what comes before the wind.

2.
Before the wind I can feel it coming.
I know when you will land on my shoulder.
I am walking through this city with a bird
who can speak, but I will not talk to you.
Kandinsky hears a symphony in the parrot’s wing,
the phosphorescent green shimmer:
It is the iridescent key of D major.
Sound and color waves and so I’ll let
the bird form the words, funny beak! Strange eyes!
He is bobbing his head for a treat.
I have him trained but cannot train
myself. He cannot sing a song,
plug your ears when he squawks. But his feathers.
Those colors are the notes to listen for.

3.
Color the notes like feathers and listen.
There is an angel with red wings on a blue-
green horse. Someone in a green robe with a red
face appears to be speaking to a child.
What was Kandinsky hearing when he spread
these strokes on the canvas? “Improvisation”
like the ruffling of plumage when the bird
takes a bath, to emerge shiny as the surface
of the pigments on the brush. Art to imitate
papaya skin, the orange flesh, beak as black
as the seeds. The G sharp of A major
holding the listener in temptation,
luring the ear to hear the resolution,
the definitive descent of tone.

4.
Expecting to hear a tone descending,
pressure on the shoulder, three points dug,
a second head, the black, hard tongue tasting
the air, and she doesn’t hear the song end.
Transformation from scales or the movement
of her tongue on her teeth. The pain inside
what seems to be a particle on her spine, pulsing,
a cramp in the calf she didn’t want,
to speak. She wanted to be the trainer
of the bird now sitting on her shoulder,
its tongue of squawks breaking eardrums and wings,
an orchestral curving of players arranged
in a half moon, a horseshoe, the rising
clarinet solo, holes open, brush on drum.

5.
Brush on drum, open holes on the clarinet,
waffling motion of a sound wave,
patat ta whoosh doo go high doo da.
An emotion oodles its way from inside your veins
to the velocity of blue banishing
on the forehead, the frontal lobe, purples,
hues and the shimmer, a drum beat,
a battalion of sixteenth notes, near this,
she thinks, is the wind. Wonderful as the fine
flexible bones in the wing. Or a yearling
yawning, newly born. She wants to smell
the matted fur, but the white becomes
yellow and then orange, green in the air,
the parrot flying off over an awning.

6.
The parrot flies over a store awning,
a scream or a squawk, some kind of green
noise and will he come back? Maybe a wind
scared him or light reflected off glass.
A prism, a humming her voice, nothing,
how the parrot turns around, and does not,
but more arcing, it looked like it would have
kept going, but his path curves around. As she holds
her arm out he lands, doesn’t move,
she can feel his heart beat and his shaking.
The four to one, G chord to the tonic D,
Bach chorale ending, the precise black line
across the painting, across the watery blue.
She caresses the soft as chalk feathers.

7.
I don’t mind the soft residue like chalk
left on my fingers from the feathers.
The sound begins: a blue lampshade, red brick
wall. I am climbing the sound like my parrot
climbing my back, tugging on my hair,
the dirge of the loss, low tone, lower still,
before the C sharp. I’ll ask my parrot,
what do you hear in this brick, and he’ll say
hello. He stretches his wings out, stunning
striations, fluffing sound in my ear.
Suddenly I hear it, the welcoming
boom when the symphony begins, dun da
squawk, tears fall as feathers, the bows are poised –
Heavy, sudden, tingling, strange, reeling.