by Danielle Brown

wing
tipped & painted, the act
of flying is a smattering
                                        of color, an inventory collapsing
                                           into repeating numerals. the sky
                                              is set:
           a back-
           ground for clouds and airplanes,
           a heuristic of handwritten auto-

           biographies. water buffalo caress
           the rocks while Passover sleeps and
           grins and yawns again. the theory
           of flight is insidious and would like
           to take the sky apart, but the theory
           is so small and unlikely to amount
           to anything in this lifetime or the ne...

   and so
there's a pair of jeans at the end
 of the bed th a wedge of paper
                          torn from a page -- page three,
                                the very beginning -- the part
                                where
           Adam had just started
           to settle in to the promise
           of the land and was turning
           to name the aviary but was
           for some reason distracted,
           caught off-guard by a glimmer
           or the creaking of an oak
           tree not yet having grown
           old. and Adam, not knowing
           that such things are natural
           or that trees and birds are of
           a conventional nature, might
           already be assuming the colors
           he is seeing are the ownership
           of the objects he haship
           of the objects he hahe has touched.
                          the snake
                              too can chirp and bend in song
                     and there is more than one way
to interrupt the thought of a man
on his way to see a little world on
its side, a world yearning to fill it-
self with water. (a little water and
a little hand-toss into the film of air.)
it is precisely the combination to bring
   along on a brightly-lit and windy day,
            and there's nothing o compare to                the feeling of being mistaken
                                                                     for a beast of the air or the after-
                                                                                  feeling
                                                                 of running
                               into a version of yourself on its
                        way back into the wiles of Eden...