F.V.
The note you dropped became a bird.
It sleeps in my chest.
Wings abjure in dreaming white.
How fast it dreams.
How slur.
A silence in the canebrake.
When we came to the canebrake.
I tore my yellow coat. You spoke to a bird.
Tall slur
of sunlight on the water’s chest.
In dreams
you take my coat into your white
shell mouth. I race among the hard white
stalks of cane, breaking
my feet sharply against their gloss. I dream
a bird
lands on the wooden desk in my chest
to slur
its bones with ink. You slur
above me like white
linen rolling outward from a tea-chest.
Come. We can sleep in the canebrake.
I know a bird
who drops down. Dreams
are falling from its beak. And some dreams
even slur,
so that the bird
may stay and speak to both of us, more white
for our time in the canebrake
sleeping chest
to chest.
How the bird trebles in our dreams
of what can break.
Inclining hard into the slur
of small exits. White
houses fold. Each roof a bird
moving in the slur
that cane-stalks make as turning white
we fill with birds—