by Chris Schaeffer

After days of calculation we derive, at last, something
Like a metaphor — ok. So. The image of barn swallows
Bowing dead branches by the municipal lot,
Dipping the limbs nearly to the ground.

So what? Suppose we note the way in which each subject bird
Alights for one moment, perhaps two, before departing,
Making way for another, shuffling in modest half-flight
Towards a caterpillar or spot of sun.
Would it be presumptuous to draw the reader
To the activity of the atom, each particle here and not here
Converging as some smug pointillist in the history of stability?

Or suppose we call these swallows desire,
And, like unpleasantly literal Buddhists, take a broom-stick
To the lower boughs until desire is abolished.

(But as we know desire returns,
nesting higher up, or on other peoples’ window-sills,
desire comes back with darker feathers flecked
with paint-blue drizzles of light on the pinions,
desire with subconscious satisfaction shits on our windshield)

In both cases language scraping its feet before the image itself,
Our words the dried berry pried from the gratework,
But never the gratework or the animal. When you sign the
          armistice,
Be sure to post-script, “I never should have opened my mouth,”

Knowing as all the most famous mad kings knew

That the tongue of birds is the kind of zen thing
You can’t just pick up and practice on long train-rides,
That it is what one might call “a defeater” a “foreclosure” or
Whatever. Lacan in paper bird mask bites his pen, writes
“name of the father” in unfamiliar beautiful script.

As the conversation elides all this,
A seedy kid in jean shorts leans, spits into the froth,
Takes off on his dirt-bike. Several metaphors suggest themselves,
Silence makes its impassioned counter-argument.
Art shrugs and rolls a cigarette, the fucking hipster.

Small deaf bird, return quickly,
My mouth is open and empty, the worm
Burrowing comfortably down my throat.

CHRIS SCHAEFFER is a biographical blurb designed to break all of your hearts.