Birds abandon the trees in twos,
threes, tens or more at a time.

The windows beside the bed
are pallets, little Sistines, story boards

of consecutive action, force
and fault: first this

and then this: it is summer, and
then you wake to slanted

light, your sometime-lover
beside you sleeping. Or

awake? His hand, a lone
mosaic on your restless thigh,

a known thing: this I own.
You watch takeoff, the thrall of

symmetrical tessellation, this
beyond branches brown,

a burnt green harbinger
of fall, a consolation of

metaphor, these birds machine
and bike chain, peppercorn and

poppy seed, flung opium and
hope patterning a loose

mathematical certainty, or
the approximation of, something

calculable by someone else,
somewhere else.