A man buries a cat in the backyard at dawn,

hoping for his second coming, 

but the cat has eight black lives behind him,

and at summer’s end, he rises one last time

by the threshold as a red rose (for any rose

is really just a type of cat

from tail to thorns).

The man, not recognizing the rose, cuts

and carries the rose to the cat’s grave.

The dying cat,

a victim of misconceptions

about the stasis of forms, colors, names

and the placement of objects in a coordinate plane,

will remain lying above himself,

exuding the aroma of physical decay,

forfeiting the roundness of his red head

and the sharpness of his fresh claws.

The man, when December ends,

grieves for the cat, disappointed,

and places his black-and-white photo

in a frame for a funeral.

/

When the woodcutters came to the town,

the trees ripped themselves up from their perennial plots

and ran away, on long, wobbling roots to the sea,

like a herd of octopi

or a swarm of thin, shriveled women.

A few were caught by the hair and chopped into pieces

(their howling like the wind eviscerating the leaves).

Others made it to the shore, threw themselves into the water like frogs,

swam south, distended in delirium, and tiny fish nested in their slimy branches.

The last understood that there is no sea and got lost in the desert, dried out from thirst, breaking their roots against the salted earth.

Occasional tourists, riding by in black jeeps,

saw their dead trunks and thought they were the spines of whales, who never were, in a sea that never was.

/

A bird—is just a word,

not a bird.

It didn’t breathe through a shell

toward the light and flail into the sky

to prove that it’s a bird.

A bird sings,

but sings—is just a word,

not a song.

Not a song at all, but a word

of a bird to another bird—

rude, sometimes anxious,

sometimes meeting in a kiss (a bird usually has a beak,

but sometimes still a kiss).

It’s not a song, but even a song—

is just a word,

just a word-memory of song:

not a song anymore,

still not a song.

A bird sings in the forest,

but the forest—is just a word,

not a wood,

wood—is just a word,

not a fir, pine, birch,

aspen, alder, linden,

larch, lucuma, cypress,

or Chilean cedar.

When a hawk has a wren,

writhing in its claws,

which one of them is then, a bird?

A bird that sang in the forest,

now sings in a cage.

But a word—is just a cage,

not a word.

In the beginning, was a bird,

why is it otherwise a cage?

Look, in the big blue

(as they say) sky

the cages fly

with so many colorful birds

inside.