Crucial Organs

You stared out at the birds arranged like black bulbs on the telephone line.
They clutched the wire full of voices, as if a current of words,
even other people’s words, is all we have to string us together.
You had the look of someone surveying a list of former lovers,
that fake indifference tipping towards disdain then longing.
The change in how you moved about the house after that – like a man
wearing a heavy, restless pear of wings – exposed the comparisons
you’d been making, and there was nothing I could say.

Sure enough, one afternoon, you strode out the door on the balls of your feet
as if your heels hurt with the desire to kick something in
and elicit a cry, as if you’d waited so long that flight began to lift you
even before you crossed the threshold into the yard.
At the clap of the screen door things began
to circle and darken the otherwise empty sky.
Then the birds settled back, wings folded, you among them digging
in the thick wire with one sharp claw to find a particularly tragic conversation,
preferably across long distances, that might reassure you
that your heart kept company with many broken others.

The sun set violently behind you for the occasion, filling the bellies of the clouds
with red, as though the planes packed with other people rushing away
had hit some crucial organ; the light pooled on the bed around me,
as I picked up the phone to hold the mouthpiece to the window.
You, fishing out my line in your search for tragedies, paused
over the bit of static without seeing, and thinking it dead, moved on to the next.