—In ornithology, a bird that has strayed 
                        off its usual migration route.

Not the first bird
with cuckoo clockwork
to misalign a star,
to take a dyslexic turn at Denver 
and descend to a grove

by an ocean not so pacific.
Specifically, these trees don’t belong here either: 
cypress, eucalyptus, transplanted
by someone in love
with anomaly, with what shouldn’t be,

but is. Out on a limb, the odd
bird alights and roosts in the wrong 
picture. Puzzle pieces
of land and sea don’t fit
the width of its instinct. If only

it could fly backward,
row the air to a line in the atmosphere, 
a place passed by mistake
where its compass whirs
unbent. But here

is the ocean unrolling into an upside-
down sky, licking air, swallowing the blood- 
orange horizon. There is no Mexico
out here, no place to land,
no place at all.