Bird in a Box

In the locker room

Where God cannot see,

In the dark corner,

Tube-socked and tank-topped,

Curled on the wooden slats

Pressed against the drab,

The cool of green tiles,

I’m shooting up longing.

I’m sucking in long

Sweet pulls of desire.

Nobody knows this.

Nobody knows me.

Even God cannot see

God God God

I close my eyes,

Expecting a harpsichord

Or the thin brass tines

Of a music box painfully

Grinding out Mozart:

Pling dah dah ding tra ling.

An emerald and citrine

Crusted wren will pop

Stiffly unfolding up

Spinning mechanically

Stretching in measures:

One wing two wing

Good-bye.

Back into the box.

Clapped shut.

Instead, I’m caught in a luminous diorama,

Painted brightly with thick washes of gouache.

The deliberate notes of a samisen are plucked

And drop soft as pollen,

Sweet as plum blossoms

Slowly unfolding.

In the melancholic stretching silences

Snow melts, rills fill, sap traces upwards.

Flurries of pink crab apple petals

Scrunch together on scabby

Blackened forked sticks,

Poking the blue cornflower sky.

A white crane kimonoed woman,

A pale spirea abloom,

Demures

And pulls from her silken sandalwood folds

A warm peach,

Offering it to me across the stream.

Barely blushing,

It opens in my hand so easily.

A cockatiel rises from its center,

Pale olive and sulfur dusted

He lights on a naked branch above me.

“He knows your secret name.

Call him to you

And he will sing it.”

But I fear his sharp beak,

His strange snail-curled tongue.

His scimitar claws

Will bloody me.

He will tattoo his name on my lips.

I cannot hold out my hand

As he chips closer,

Questioning in rising tones,

In little hops

Down the branch:

please

please

please