Considering an Oriole and a Bird Extinct

 
Looking into the mirror of your page
the last time                              is like
the first time:
 
The old house guards its memories, the birds
 
Returning to me, migrants, your words flutter
mind and heart. You create safe shore clasping
to yourself the memory of lost feathers, lost birdcall.
 
They cluster at the feeding station, and rags of song
Greet the neighbours. ‘Was that your voice?’
 
Somewhere on this land lies buried the bones
of an extinct piopio, ancestor of Ashbery’s muse.
Somewhere deep in the lines of your poem too.
 
But one morning you get up and the vermillion-coloured
Messenger is there, bigger than life at your window
 
Excavating a poem is like excavating a dead bird:
for both, we must count the silences, unravel
the subtext and discover how order is broken
across the body, spilling into fresh lines.
 
And even when they fly against the trees in bright formation
You know the peace they brought was long overdue.
 
How is it that a poem remembers the bird still,
As if it was a dictionary, as if it was a page?
 
 
 
 
 
* ‘Found’ lines from John Ashbery’s ‘The Orioles’.