Translation
A Poem From Barbed Water
A year in minnows, a year spent fighting extinction, a year around the edges, a year underwater, a year spent lodged in the muddy bottom of it all, a year watching for the egg, a year waiting for hatching, a year in flight, in transit, in Venus a year in view, a year looking up through the looking glass of pond, a year spent in shallow water, looking down. This yellow-rumped warbler, she speaks swan. These are the only visitors. The ones who come after the trumpets. The ones who say they can teach the swans the migration route, lost for some reason to deep memory. Or perhaps they are just too curious to follow the deep migration routes, perhaps they hear the whispers of some other sort of routing. One that spells doom and the end of their line, to be sure. Nonetheless loud, insistent, a clamoring drownable by no blood. Regardless of threat to life, it calls to them. Once unfocused, who else would follow the airplane dressed as the mother trumpeter? Who else would mistake feathers for silicon and steel? Who else would read the hieroglyphs of migration as stagnant? There is not much company here; only the cows with their wooden shoes. Only me, with my fixed labors. Me, with my botched migration Me, with my deviled heart.
