I have been givenwhat I never asked
to see: the airborne
pigeon vivisected
by the scissor
of an airplane’s
wing, the bird’s
eye open, wholly
open to the half-
beat of its severed
vein, suspended
midway, only
momentarily
between the purling
updraft and
a sudden slack
unspooling
in the flightpath’s
string: as if
the bird were being held
before it fell,
as if the act of being
halved itself
had set the bird against
its fall no less
than flight: as if the bird,
in being briefly
still, found second life.
