There Go Birds Peter Markus
There were ghosts in these woods that lived as birds do.
They sat up in trees or flew through the blue or the black of the sky, by
day or by night, they sat and they sang as they flew, and when they sang
like they did you knew they were there, you did not have to see them to say
there go birds, you did not have to point at them with your hands to hold
them in your eyes. It was as if each time a bird cried out a new ghost was
born but the boys did not fear this: they did not run through the woods to
hide back in the house where they lived with the girl they called Sis and
the girl with no tongue down in the part of her mouth where words did not
live there. No, what these boys did was, they took up with their hands rocks
and made rocks be not of this earth but be more a part of the sky, a thing
made to take flight, the way birds dive their heads down in a lake to find a
fish in that deep blue or the way a fish might climb up in a tree to sing or
else hang like a fruit ripe to our touch: skin and stem and flesh that when
you reach up to touch it, the tree that holds it in its branched arm lets it
fall. And so it is that the thing to do is to catch it and rub it clean,
press its smooth skin up to the teeth in your mouth till the juice that is
there in it runs clean from where its seed is a thing you can't see but you
know when you hold it that it's there: a heart that in truth is a stone, or
the wing of a bird that is more bone than it is a hand that holds up the
sky.
Peter Markus' most recent book is THE FISH AND THE NOT FISH.
Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Fan D.
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