Doves and Peacocks

I

Just like the swifts that bargained with Darwin and lost
their legs to the sky, you seem certain freedom will compensate
death, much the same way you’d toss dollars in wells for happiness
when nickels would suffice for the same
in a gambler’s machine.

I think you think you are a swift, uncurling
from the shards of rules you broke ramming your head
straight through them. You may be bleeding but your grin seeps teal green
mottos: we’ll live free, and for the greater good, just like every
tyrant who’s ever lived.

You’d like to be a leaf in a book, but I don’t think
you’re the sort to keep within bindings without ripping them
clean. You’d burst margins like rivers break
banks and topple trees, leaving the adventuring swifts nowhere
to roost.

Every year at thousand-mile flyways, we watch birds break
into apple song, leaping away to pursue ancient routes marked on neural maps—
no eyes for lighthouses or garages on the coastal wayside, nor
the crows’ telegraph poles—praying instead that new caves spring
from the sand to house them in crackling cape towns halfway down latitudes
when the world tilts and the north freezes over.

If swifts knew astrology they’d know
their stars are good at least once a year.

But the better parts of your legs lie
trophies in Darwin’s cabinet and we know when you fly, you fly
in pursuit of your death.

II

I am not a swift.

I like the walls.
We might be butterflies in a bell
jar, lid held shut by the monarch’s ring finger
and perhaps to you a cocoon is
prison

You’d like to slit these silken threads
but that seems no better to me,
only an exchange of some dreary safety
for some exhilarating peril.

I’d rather die slowly, old books in
my lungs, rusting
crown about my neck
than plunge straight through windows
the way you do.