"But Feathers of Discontent--
Kingfishers."
I used a line in the poem for the title of each poem.
Our beginning was covered in water,
and all the animals spoke the same language.
Panther tracked back and forth across the skies,
long escarpments, nightfall, and rock mouth.
Buzzard grew tired and flapped his broad wings.
The soil beneath him rippled into hills.
Our threads unraveled.
Spider's reins returned.
Beneath the surface of the floodwaters,
the lost people rubbed their faces
with earth, their rutted eyes resistant roads of grain.
The only willing survivors--
not ghosts, the planet's oldest organisms,
but feathers of discontent kingfishers, drifting
wind struck over Earth's ancient vents,
sketched on their city's chipped brass plates,
our futures' blinking archipelago.
Wouldn't it be preferable to drown, victims of upper world
explanation?
There are no hard syllables in water.
Our boat disappeared over the Earth's edge,
and what we didn't see was paradise.
Thank you, Michael, for the echoes,
as I heard paradise in two of your pieces.
And I feel like I--
this book, I have, paradise, mentioned a lot, too,
and I'm still curious about that.
[LAUGHS] That's something to be curious about.