The Birds Fly Up
The birds fly up,
The birds fly down,
The birds fly underneath the ground.
In layers of silt, beneath our feet
Their feathers rustle, deep on deep.
John walks up,
John walks down,
John walks to another town.
Dust in his mouth; dust in his shoes.
Birds overhead, in ones and twos.
The Drunken Planet
When the infestation’s gone
by fire or flood or slow, dead bleed of air
I’ll shrug, the mountains snapping like a song
and roll into the dark that opens there
cold and quiet, an infinity of nought
pouring into craters, valleys, deeps,
climbing the cold, with neither breath nor thought,
as into motion, motionlessness leaks
scouring fish from rivers, dirt of worms,
vultures from the deep black carrion skies,
until the only flying thing is death which turns
without a mind, out of the path of eyes,
of me and of the dead, for we are none
save beauty, that bright plague, lost as the sun.
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