excerpt from The Way Birds Become

I felt a bird had come true.

*

The possibilities you tear out of
a bird never precludes that I can see you from
underwater, like baby Jessica at the bottom of
the well, looking upward at the glimmer that used to be
the world. If a bird sees you there
it looses voice. And this we both know.
You knew that silence could be as comforting and full
as an overstuffed pillow. If you lay down
a bird, you both fall asleep
though the longer you lie, the less
I can see. The longer you stay with a bird the older it gets,
hair silvering.

I see no possibility beyond this bird, its
wings as saggy and old as a friend
unrecognizable after a long separation.
Like a longed for presence, and so easily
taken for a wolf, the bird is mere conjecture
from "pieces of the past arisen from the rubble,"
made to make do. Its flashing still causes a
trembling in every swoop of annual return.

                                                                    - Joseph Bradshaw