My Lover Meets the Bower Bird

He nods at the silence then tries out his love song:
a sound like your callused palms rubbing in the cold.
To end he drops bottle top onto bottle shard: a chink
that stills him with wonder at the beauty of human excess.
You are formally welcomed with a flash of pink topnotch

and a bow to admire his masterpiece in the making; sublime
with the melancholy of fetish love, unconsummation.
He guides your eye through his lovelorn mosaic, constellations
of plastic and foil, soft rings of back bones orbiting on
Monopoly pieces, jewel-bits of shattered windshield

for making sunlight his own. He dismisses you with a sudden
cry at a composition of seeds loosened by the breeze.
He nudges them back into a pattern divined
then at the bower's exact centre he stations himself:
pivot-of-the-world, mad with symmetry.

copyright 2005 Lucy Holt
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