The Store Stump

I’ve awoken from a late night with fearful tenderings, dead ache bones fishing to take hard medicine outside the cricket moon still crowing. We talked on the phone he asked am I Narcissus? I said if we’re going to talk Greeks, can I be Icarus? Only partly for the wings, but mostly for the red heart Matisse gave him in the falling. The dawn is bold and lionous, my bathroom tiled floor white and cold on bare feet and slumped limbs, a world of shakings, tremblings, to be in a body with gutted bones. The chickadee is calling outside the way it did when I was six and I hunted it in the back of our blue Nissan truck with binoculars. I hunted that sound, the chickadee dee dee, like Cherokee, because of the liquorish feel it left on my tongue. My limbs are stones in the early morning air the cold softness of the honed weight against the floor, Egyptian fossils, encased, alien. I’ll keep crouching here to belong to the bird’s legends, to adorn the tongue with home. To make mating calls. To watch that phone turn into beanstalks and bear its long green fruit. To give my faulty ticker with its animal beats to the red belly of the sun.