Dani Couture: Red Crown

RED CROWN

*

How a Toronto pigeon sold
for five thousand dollars,
is delicately inserted into a tube, sleeps,
and wakes in new hands in Dubai.

*

How the butcher bird skewers
its prey, impales it on thorn
or spike for later.

*

How coyotes have erased rabbits
and gophers from their holes,
but not wild turkeys from scrub
or low pine. Their toothy spurs,
hard breast plates, eagle eyes
in Sunday dinner dress.

*

How red-crowned cranes race
from Sibera to Korea and back again;
the flock in Eastern Hokkaido
who’ve shorted migratory switch.

*

How a black paper crane,
South Korea-sent, years late
is found pressed between
two books. Love, _____.

*

How the dead forever home,
like blind pilots for territory
real or imagined. An island
recorded, but long unseen.
Years of endless water.
Mongoose dreams.