Between Birds & I

No longer does a spirit extend
between myself and the roadside
birds. Before, flames of light
licked out from a hawk's
sudden form, and blue music
gripped me with fresh hands
when a heron stood upright
on a swell of grass within sight
of my hunched position at the wheel.
That was the way it was.
Sparrows flitting in liquid mass
were charged with the pathos
of a rainbow, or a lover.

Now, I still see, but
the record hand pulls the wrong way
clicking over the cocentric circles outward,
not making the infinite music of rhythm with
the world's wise, but instead the dry notch
of foot on plank, of conscious eyes clicking
in unmoistened sockets, walking towards an ocean
of silence.