The feathered wife asked her feathered husband –
  
She watches as he cleans his wings, notes how he sends his eyes
        over the horizon
To viridian in the flying away direction.
So many migrations stacked within sky memory.

Her body is stirring with eggs. She tucks found materials
Into their nest with her beak.
The nerves in her wingtips sense rains coming to soften the ground.
To send food to the surface of the earth.
 
He says nothing –
As he wonders about the careless debris that humans make
Even as it yields ribbon, floss and string.
 
Housecats and their sporting trails are on his mind’s map.
There are too many in this neighborhood.
 
A ragged yellow fellow eats birds after hours of play.
He stays out of that tom’s way, and has warned his wife
The same. Though she’s more wisely wary than him.
 
Dogs are easy. They bark and leap and wag their tails.
They have no concerns for most flying things.
They lap up human trails for love.

And why do we keep renewing this ceremony of nests?
Each feathered generation flies away.
What does it mean, and why
the green growing green
turning red against yellow,
then gray, gray and green again?

When I need her heartbeat
In the freeze winds why is she always there
And not somewhere else?
 
Her lilt question has made an echo in his ears
like a string fluttering from a bush
In the delicate spring wind:

I wonder what you are thinking . . .
  
He doesn’t answer.
 
Then he does.
  
“Nothing.
I was thinking about the nothing of nothing at all.”