Friend, Did You Know It’s Possible to Identify Birds Only by Their Songs*

And each of us out here chirping and warbling and calling out for succor/each of us gape mawed and clinging/and they say we are born alone/we die alone but that is as absurd as saying there is silence anywhere/ever, as if the wind itself doesn’t have a cadence/a timber/a drumbeat /as if at the very center of a hurricane is a vacuum/that moment when Andrew paused before swallowing Miami whole and chewing—/Now that was a sound, audible 1000 miles away, our house being chewed like that/as if when a storm blinks and the winds stop and the birds are gone and even the cicadas know enough to shut the fuck up/as if there is a moment there without that blood rush poundpoundpound in your ears that says you are veryveryveryvery afraid/that woosh that thud/as if when I put my head upon your chest I do not hear the murmur of a small hole in your heart or maybe it is mine,/we are so tangled that I cannot identify you from me

only by our song.

*Title taken from the subject line of an email from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology