The way blackbirds solve for

winter. How upset I am

without feathers. No black collar, no tailwind. On the floor,

regardless, crying. Health insurers hate me. I hate me too,

I tell Denice from Toledo, so who wants me

in the divorce? My days are all light haloes and

automation. I don’t look at sunsets like I used to. Honeybees mob

in flung distance; worries oxen the sky across my forehead, owl down inside the

dales of my cheeks. Charred land and brawny newscasts

tracking Canadian wildfires from helicopter. New York stained tangerine

in June. Below

my bedroom window, coyotes harangue. I imagine they’re wolves when

I’m scared. I don’t know what that says

about me. It means I want

a wolf. I want to know enough to name

the way wolves scent along the wind with senses so superior

they stir storms of electrical signaling after every inhale. And the beaver,

how her teeth curve against different kinds of trees. I also crave

empty spaces. Hunger

gaps. The sensation

of biting a male spider raw. To lick a bear cub's paw after a thorn. I catalog

the underside of a tern’s upturned wing, a pair of gulls, a brown bat’s sewing

flight. Swifts spend so much of their lives planning

around incoming storms. Anxious

behavior? We’re similar animals: ozone

stung and afraid

of the horizon. My mind,

a fishing net. Too many holes; the trout swim

through. Off the path

white bones lance a village of mushrooms. The blackbirds have been

and gone. What I know

I know without help: By now

the dead carry different names.