GLACIER

In my chest is a glacier melting.

Yes I have a little sadness

I have no use for.

I will give it to my friend Bill

who likes those kinds of things,

who will make of it

a house.

Bill is a poet, a tinker, always nailing, pacing, 

taking cogs out

so the machinery of even a sunny morning

becomes broken

all over the garden

as if the cat had got to it

and wouldn’t kill it

and wouldn’t, 

batting the morning around

until finally the steps

are strewn with the tattered, gutted thing:

clouds, the heads of daffodils,

the little heart of a dormouse.  

THE BLUEBIRD IS A MACHINE

Bluebird peels himself from the windowpane, dusts himself off. He looks around. His dumb

brothers are preening in the fountain. Ruffling drunkenly. Splish splash.

Listen, bluebird says. I am telling you something important.

No one turns around.

The sky is made of glass. Everywhere there are barriers erected. I wish to fly this way and that into

living rooms made of light, he says. Into televisions. The people there are the same size as bluebirds.

The bluebird imagines a world without windows. He wants to triumph over glass. The things he

would do! He wants to try the car. He wants to try the microwave. He wants to perch on the well-

dressed mannequin in the quiet of the department store at night. He wants to nestle in its furs.

Bluebird is tired of dressing the air, garlanding the clouds with his dips and climbs and ceaseless

swooping. He wants to be held inside glass. To be encased. He wants to be displayed as true art, not

just a flourish in God’s big sky. 

Sometimes he thinks he wants to be made into a hat. 

He knows this is ridiculous.

He would make such a tiny hat.

But not as tiny as the hats his brothers wear. Their hats are made of spiders. Laughing spiders. Joyful

spiders. Spiders making contributions to beauty. Spiders with jobs. The bluebird does not find

himself beautiful, because to be beautiful, it is his belief, one must be of use. 

“The house is a machine for living in,” he says to his reflection in the glass. He often quotes Le 

Corbusier. 

The bluebird, like the great architect, is anti-ornament. 

He looks at his body. His bloodied mouth. He sees its smeared brushstroke on the windowpane.

The blood is red and pretty. Even his tears are ornaments.