from The way birds become homonyms: an aviary

to say as birds as well as words

          *

The knowledge not of the century, you were
saying, but of birds.
"How dare you pronounce the world," you
said "as birdswept." Weather I say is
the knowledge not of sorrow, but of
windows, and past them
smoke, fatal evidence of birds. If
they'd stop singing, I'd talk
of music. Because my hands
smell like water, like how the beak
and the charred parts of the neck
both smell like water. I'd say I don't
believe water, everything under
its sucking current, cement.