The Scarecrow who would be Poet who would be Revolutionary

If you needed permission to be sick, why did you come to my door? 
I've polished your shoes with tissue and spit. My thumb is useless and sore.
 
So much is unnecessary. I turn off lights, turn over chairs, turn up the volume. 
I used to turn you on until you took up birds. A new art form. 

Bored, but efficient, I feed paperclips to your yellow canary.
She sputters and chokes, but the prognosis is good.

In the upstairs loft, you toss around laundry and new ideas.
On paper your notes make little sense, but when you speak,

your voice draws crows, pigeons, and nervous sparrows
who twitch-twitter-tweet. My house is a flock of feathers and Tourette's.

Gulls make the long trip north to nest in your straw belly.
The smallest dove got lost inside your Spalding Gray clothes. 

I press my ear to your chest and hear wings flapping,
then the unmistakable coos of love.

At night, you raise your arms. Bats descend on our kitchen
and insist their definitive wing structure 

makes them equal parts mammal and bird. In protest.
I show  my own breasts, round and featherless. 

In this crowd, I'm an outcast, but I don't trust anyone 
who lacks a sufficient number of toes. 

The Hoover clogs with seeds and down. 
I am vacuuming up your words to hang magnetically on our fridge 

right next to Michelangelo's David 
who is nude and compliant when I reach for the mayonnaise jar.

Wintering with a Stillborn

Power lines collapse under ice-glazed trees. 
I am in the dark, a place I sometimes visit 
of my own volition. When I've had enough, 
I hum a battle hymn and change my underwear 
near the window where my neighbor might watch. 
I've seen him crouched there with a flashlight 
the nights his wife works late. Sometimes 
he plays Vivaldi on his stereo, sometimes Bach. 
He is not the sort of man to cum in his own hand. 

With the curtain tied back, a milky light washes my room. 
On the shelf, I keep a tin of slivered almonds 
and a jar holding a fetus. Homo Sapiens. Female. 
Born to another woman, I hesitate to name her. 
Once, I rocked her in my arms so hard 
her apple-doll head thumped against the glass. 
I felt remorseful, but unchanged. You'd left that night, 
returned to another life in which I am not a keeper. 

Sometimes I pace the street outside your office. 
I wear a black coat and stilettos. I'm your wife, 
waiting for a cab to take us to dinner. 
You are running late. I show the driver 
our lost child. I fill the jar with handfuls of snow, 
shake it until the baby wakes, her mouth open to cry.