VINYL POETRY

Volume 9, November 2013

BIRDIE
Julia GuezView Contributor’s Note

Paraphrase

From the moon whose many deaths meant only to console us

a faint promise whose absence is no fault of the weather. Outside of this
window a new psalm and therefore a tanager

which does not belong here

and has, after all the archetypal traumas and then some,

thought of settling in whereabouts vague
and untranslatable, yet never settled,

hardly ever resting on this branch

beginning to build itself a home out of what we know

to call kindling in the cicatrix of a crepe myrtle which
from time to time will flourish

so completely, the fact of its own

withering is lost among the boughs’ pomp and color.