Reincarnation

I am myself unlike myself.

A flicker of a body.

A buna, monarch-orange, pregnant with beechnuts,

bends by a body of water, an episodic river.

Fall has begun its slow murder. Sun

arrives like a leopard speckled in blizzard clouds.

Do not look up, but bark on bark, etch

the poem of echoes & sweet, soft lands.

Water is my mother today. Creamy foam,

frothing falls, flash of eels, distant oxbow.

Plunge into its toothless mouth. Span my arms.

Mid-air, I grow alulas & a pink bill flecking black.

Godwit, my body. I aviate into another season.

Pinnae of light. Lightness of life, pollen

carried by wind into the night

of a body eclipsed by another body.