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to make space for the new. They say the dropped ones will come true. Th stranger’s lateness worries those who wait. Someone says she’s searching for a word to complete a special sentence, the gift she’ll bring to town. Another wonders if she seeks a verb or a noun, and offers to find her. A third warns that the stranger may turn him, with one touch, into a flower that blooms for only an instant before it withers and dies, her circle throbbing with songs that cause sadness and elation, and something so obscure no one has a name for it. Will she complete a verb or a noun phrase – or go solo, a word complete on its own? They wonder. When they finally hear footsteps, They know the stranger must be near. Make sure the gate is open, they remind one another. They hear clinking – A bracelet? A chain? 6
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Song Inside a Fossil She’s still looking down at her baby after 4,800 years. Her fossil has the curve of mothers telling endless stories in the dark. There were three birds in the cage, she says. Two died of poisoned water. Though birds don’t know what poison means, the survivor has the memory of thirst and of two silent birds. If birds’ memories are circles, a line must bisect them, tracing their migration to places that are neither homelands nor exiles. But what if the world, for birds, is all exile, till they leave it behind? The day her baby came into the world, she carried water to him in her voice. She sung so close, he could hear her heart beat like a bass drum. He won’t remember the seeds her words scatter, but won’t forget the debris of what was shattered from every wingbeat recalling her. 7

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to make space for the new. They say the dropped ones will come true. Th stranger’s lateness worries those who wait. Someone says she’s searching for a word to complete a special sentence, the gift she’ll bring to town. Another wonders if she seeks a verb or a noun, and offers to find her. A third warns that the stranger may turn him, with one touch, into a flower that blooms for only an instant before it withers and dies, her circle throbbing with songs that cause sadness and elation, and something so obscure no one has a name for it. Will she complete a verb or a noun phrase – or go solo, a word complete on its own? They wonder. When they finally hear footsteps, They know the stranger must be near. Make sure the gate is open, they remind one another. They hear clinking – A bracelet? A chain?

6

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