Chico, my blind budgie, to his dying gasp singing
of woodlands clinging to bars. In the crimson fields
below our lanai, a tallow ribbon of river
straining against a bottle neck, pressing onward.
In the southern heavenscape a speck, a vermillion atom
unmanned, interminably fondled.
Beyond the blind budgie's bars, a star's
frail pulsing. Its light,
they say, has surpassed its living.
The dead take up the habit of being.
A blind eye never ceases pulsing.
The opal star sings of woodlands clinging to bars.

Yes, we are waiting
at World's End, where Tyler's Landing
turns to sea. A diadem of seabirds
engorges us. At water's edge where the fiddler crabs roost
the vermilion x of a stranded dinghy,
two dead faces, two heads of wooly lichen greeting.

The bloodstains of the broken waters
recall us to Uncle Pibb
taken in the line of duty

a geologist
tasked with reconciling graphs of Loma Prieta:
Who stirred the ant bed?
What slight bade the heavens resent us so?

All crimes are made by fingers
Uncle Pi bb's converging with rosewood and steel
mother's fumbling in a tumbler when the chintz is drawn

mine crossed, trembling
in one another, yielding sacrament for transgressions
I can't remember.