The pale frame holding.

     Petrichor rising from damp earth.
     At roost a wake of vultures.
     The bald eagles in the EcoTarium.

Each spring the open river a memory
for the female with a broken wing
and the wounded male—

     just as migrants take flight,
     leaving Valparaiso,
     leaving Guayaquil.

On his mate’s back, the male totters,
helpless to perform the cloacal kiss,
the two eggs unfertilized.

More than a dalliance,
a tarantella,
they continue.

     A colony of adder tongues.
     A sky of Della Robbia clouds.

When mother fell she bent,
her downfall.
Or it began when her husband
raped her. She said that.
My conception.

I keep waking up thinking:
     the water’s rising,
     the cat’s locked in the bath,
     the ceiling’s collapsed.

This, then, the deaf composer
on stage beating time,
listening to the silence
of his ovation.
His world: ice, water, rock, joy.

Where the river swells it begins,
eagles waiting for last snow.