The Birds Fly Up; The Drunken Planet by Noah Berlatsky

The Birds Fly Up

The birds fly up,

The birds fly down,

The birds fly underneath the ground.

In layers of silt, beneath our feet

Their feathers rustle, deep on deep.

John walks up,

John walks down,

John walks to another town.

Dust in his mouth; dust in his shoes.

Birds overhead, in ones and twos.

The Drunken Planet

When the infestation’s gone

by fire or flood or slow, dead bleed of air

I’ll shrug, the mountains snapping like a song

and roll into the dark that opens there

cold and quiet, an infinity of nought

pouring into craters, valleys, deeps,

climbing the cold, with neither breath nor thought,

as into motion, motionlessness leaks

scouring fish from rivers, dirt of worms,

vultures from the deep black carrion skies,

until the only flying thing is death which turns

without a mind, out of the path of eyes,

of me and of the dead, for we are none

save beauty, that bright plague, lost as the sun.