Laid out in rows like exotic
produce at a weekend farmers market,
yellow and brown and feathery,
these flocks of birds just died, nearly
a thousand of a dozen
kinds, shattering them-
selves against a big-city skyscraper
during one long night, skewed
by light and sky-reflecting panes
that, right at the end, they
knew to be the one stretch of winter
sky they would never get through.
A carcass-carpet, the article
called them, but I prefer
seeing them as seed-filled fruit:
if you planted one, a new
businessman would grow
and walk every day to work,
a newspaper folded under
his arm like a wing, and there
he would sit in his cubicle
in his cubicle row and sometimes
look out the twelfth-floor
windows and wonder
if there was something he should know.