Conjuring A Language by Kymberly Taylor
Y crashes down, feet first,
between the untended flares,
singeing a few underfeathers.
She roams
in the scattering black
stars off
past exquisite poisons
prisming the parks, a helmet-shrike
testing cinnamon rocks,
a paper ship that in another light
is a boy dreaming
that death is sometimes a bird throned
upon her landfill, rose-white, jewelled above the spree. Y
sails with boy on his tattered boat,
teaching him decomposition, the ways of styrofoam, scrap iron,
string. How to be incomplete. Flying him
through raspy metaphoric conditions, recent vocabularies,
ambiguities
Far removed from his original, he has forgotten it,
become repeated form precarious,
dark spot on the other side of say
As Y drops him from her beak, he falls through pearl
and the odd stray things he has thought about or once held
in his hands and set afloat upon
the glittering rupture of a stream
disintegrating into random line, curve, argument, sign,
index for the possible
[The bird song notations in this poem are composed by Olivier Messiaen and include the songs of Berdin de Malaisie, Troupiale de Baltimore, Grive de Californie, and Cardinal rouge de Virginia for piano, flute, xylophone, violin, clarinet, and tam tam. ]
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