The Bird’s Guide to Being an Artist

1.

The crane flowers look better

when half the buds are blooming,

as if to boast 

do you see that

what in a moment 

I can become 

is more than?  

Or in a breeze where

forty-odd fanning

leaves stocked in mass

reach like feathers used to suspend

a fishing fly on water.

Either, prophetic

triads elevating 

the secondaries—  

purple, orange, green. 

But who forebodes whom in the case of the bird?

2.

I wonder,

recalling  David Attenborough explaining

these mountain birds have all they need.

The Birds-of-Paradise.

All descendants of the crow.

If you piss clear, eat your veggies, and 

most important

wear dry socks

you can do just about fuckin’ anything!

The sentiment echoed

my first day as a migrant worker.

3.

One goes like this:

shaking trees, removing debris—

sticks, twigs, leaves, grass, rocks,

(all under the dead-branch arbour)

after a breeze, a few squawks,

sticks, twigs, leaves, grass and what

for?

You can’t make clean work

if you don’t have a clean work area!

I hear him, tracing

my eye around his

ceramic faux coal 

filling a funnel filter,

down copper tubes to 

trump-lowell Dixie

cups with bright 

orange goldfish decals wrapping

every stacked cone

in this show he made about bad water— 

a midwestern straight-shooter,

also known for his teapots on wheels.

4.

It proceeds

like Jesco White, the Dancing Outlaw

on a homemade stage in the woods

under an obsidian umbrella.

Paradiddling syncopating footsteps on mute. 

a little to the left, a little to the right

and around ee and ugh

two ee and ugh

around ee and ugh

Stop. 

I forgot about the voodoo. 

About the snakeskin burnishing rag 

blessing the only seat in the house

and the berries scattered, preemptive 

roses to remind this dance is not for you.

5.

I’m still talking about one bird 

(of forty kind) 

on an island with competition breeding

new moves and colors and forms,

like when Chuck Close, Richard Sierra, Janette Smith, Jennifer Bartlett, and Vija Celmins

were classmates in ‘64. 

6. 

I, too, am annoyed when I read all the colorful birds are male. 

But for the sake of argument, 

assume people are not birds.

And birds are not women and men.

Assume birds are just birds

7. 

so after eyes flash in passion— 

blue to burning yellow,

and a thousand lifetimes unveil 

technicolored iridescence 

in brilliant shuffled breast flashes,

so when you watch the courting dance under the wedding archway,

the six plooms stretching from the skull of this thing

become, like I see,

black stamens pirouetting—-

8.

hoping to be seen,

hoping to fuck,

hoping to live forever,

but knowing,

it will die

doing the same thing

anyway.