Starlings are Hazardous Sonnets

STARLING SONNET #1

Sitting patiently as Lucifer in a situation
Love spread its fractal-loving starlings.
Over the winter river, they veered
and darted where I met you

Where we met again many years later

There is the crowd side to matter
I have things I should tell you:
I trust starlings

Or are starlings
the things that turn
on the bridgework

of language which is posing as a spirit

That place where we stand in the frozen air

trying to make a conversation under them?

Veer as theirs.


STARLING SONNET #2

Look at those fucking starlings as they haunt the air
above the interstate

as they menace motorists with ther attention-getting

Didn't they shit like the pigeons
on that bridge for decades
until it collapsed?

You stand on that bridge and talk

to language posing as spirit.

It's a human being you could grab by the lapels

before all their sentences changed

and throw them to the starlings.

Imagine.

You could throw your love into the winter river.



Is this the only way to derail grammar

in a world of free-flying starlings?



Men and women in prison wonder every night.


The starling question is not even in the Bible.


But it probably should be.



STARLING SONNET #3


You could throw your lover into the winter river.

As the starlings formed their strange aerial masses
over the frozen river, over the bridge where you both stood.

You could throw him or her and all their sentences
into the winter river!

Get your name in the papers

while their strange fractals composing a flock
shaped like a giant starling
went milling love

above your act of murder, oblivious....

that giant winter sphere of starlings

their reflection in the water

would go on concerning itself

only with the drowned mysteries of form


too funny, too cold


The bridge is today