rehabilitating birds of prey

i.
a deer is struck by a sedan
limps to the median and collapses
watching the last wildflower open

ii.
your mouth turns into a moth
buds a pair of wings, spreads
speech on a rippling lake

three boys throw rocks at
a vulture landing
to pick at the eye of a deer

the valet takes your bags,
shifts into gear and drives
into the dissolving distance

in the middle distance, sirens
blare and whirl into afterlife…but no siren
for the deer, the vulture

we lament on moths as souls the closing
of their wings is loud as the darkness from
the closing of a match

we call the vulture paris and the future bright:
one dead mouse per day in a leather glove
that she turns into abstract expressionism

she can no longer see
so she eats from my fingertips at her beak
what she really craves: my liver and apology—

walking through the rehabilitation
center, i step through fallen branches
to the captivity of a snowy owl

dig into frozen earth
spade into shivering rock
offer ice water to arctic body

two lovers thaw in linen sheets
under the morning sun
orbit each other’s materializing breath

tonight the pine forest: a cathedral

you dip a bloody beak into a multiplying body
i fall asleep to my sins: the dishwasher
drinking down glutton and heme off a fork

in the background, a capitalist monument rises;
brick by brick, a crane operator in his own
form of qi gong finds zen in the mortar

iii.
remember when we earthed children
in handfuls of soil, molding dominions
for seeds…the fetal blue potatoes, beating?

***

Search Engine Meditations

***

floodgate: memory.

seawalls built in floods of mind

swells thrash against realizing self

thawing: glacier.

auras flash first in ultramarine,

then: the shade of grief

grief is one more rock in the wall

against the sea

thrashing: leviathan self.

self thaws into my hands: a flood—

i cannot come to water my plants.

i can only catch the falling leaves.

i cannot move my hands.

***

frank’s poetry has appeared in Hobart, Apricity Magazine, Tiger Moth, and other gracious journals that find space his his writing.