EATING THE MESSAGE

Thornton raised budgies, minahs, cockatoos, canaries

a few rare birds, but his trade hung in homing pigeons.
Released from the fingertip of his windy, hill home
birds flew to Mexico, Brazil, Massachusetts, Skokie.
Most accurately managed to meet sky-high schedules,
some so strong they negotiated the static storms
while others found high mesa currents like the stones
in a zen garden: around then back to the track.

One pigeon, her feathers pink as early twilight,
developed a problem: She would fly halfway to
her destination, then somehow change her mind.

Standing around all these smelly birdcages as kids
we imagined Bessie heading up out of Guadalajara,
taking a right around Austin and then failing to come
straight in. Bessie, a real Injun scout, that bird:
drunk on firewater in a pea-sized brain heading out
over the high desert, probably near Albuquerque.
Sure. We called each other Bessie as our joke.

I wish she would make up her mind, Old Thornton
told us, shrugging his shoulders. She gets the call
then something goes wrong. Maybe she's thinking
'There's a shiny object!' or 'There's a traffic cone!'
and up and plain forgets about her homing-sense.

We'd laugh. Bessie often returned to Thornton
in a cage: UPS Ground would deliver her, delicate,
pinkish feathers creased, neck bleeding pus
the poor thing terrified, and her leg-tag? Halfway
chewed off. Found by some New Mexico child.

Think of the Monarch Butterflies, Thornton mused,
moving around an invisible mountain on instinct....
Yeah. Bessie'd be the one not to make it. Too busy
checking gnawing clues from deep in the sky:
houses, water towers, highway lane reflectors,
television antennae, bulldozer noise. Yes, Bessie
untouched by her primitive navigation, he'd joke;
Bessie hung on a cross of air, reading roadsigns.

Mr. Thornton later was imprisoned for trade in heroin.

- Gordon Hilgers

(featured in the poetry forum 06.08.10)

HEARTH

My feet
flat on linoleum
became cold, blunt, realized
in expressions of the lost
which meant I stood
outside their prison walls
looking for a hearth
though the imagined warmth
was masquerade comfort
and so my cold feet
lit like candles at the end
of two bones
told me, Walk, walk, Gordon, walk.

- Gordon Hilgers

SLEEP

Sleep. Today was a dream.
A little sugar melts in the rain
yet the sweetness? This stays
like the buttons of your blouse
unbuttoning, then fastening
then placed away again, dark, deep
yet held even in the curbsides
as the busses splash by me
and I'll taste but a little, dreaming
as if this day was only sleep.

- Gordon Hilgers

TO THE DARK ANGELS, RAPPING

Two angels, imagining themselves
into this life like wordless movie extras
bring up their suspicious journeys through the night
though this stood up more solidly
once memory moved them to speak.
No one was listening anyway, one said
but I blew out that candle at least twice
and she lit it again and again
too busy to notice breeze from the door
might have been my wing.

The angels. They knock as if to prod you:
By the telephone, from inside the dresser drawers
once or twice upon the window pane
or the wall, a falling potted plant, the props
at hand. Dark angels. Too shy to reveal their faces.

Then the other one muttered about unemployment
here in the No Man's Land of Science
carried about a literalistic city
like a cheap whore.

I also tried calligraphy, the first continued
yet these teenaged Latinos just can't spell.
I've been commenting on chaos
for years now, and all anyone sees
are the scribbles. If I could only tell someone
that I held the hands that wielded spray paint
or that language is such a poor vehicle,
the message might have made it.

Two dim angels, drinking cheap Texas red
in a dive somewhere, anywhere, far from here
and farther from the dark tables
and it's deathly sad when they begin
to speak about women.

- Gordon Hilgers