Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in Sou’wester, The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Pebble Lake Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, qarrtsiluni, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Her Vena Amoris (Red Bird Chapbooks), is available and her chapbook, Ophelia Unraveling is available from Dancing Girl Press.
The Ornithologist Is Collecting The Dark
under the bird wing. And then there is the beautiful and long-lasting damp
unknown. The birds so trusting when she asks why.
All day she waits in the swallows’ strangeness their bones
clicking out the air’s years like some trapped
abacus moving the blue beads. The hour floating as she picks out the alula
feathers the uppertail coverts the underwing coverts the flank.
The breathing and the pull of relaxation. Buoyancy of a coil.
Within an s shaped neck of the heron a dark upstairs and a blizzard.
The nuptial plumes hardest to pull. Like the inviolate dream where
he kissed her and she can’t heavily forget. It is raining out and pale.