VII. THE AUGUR

            depicts
elective ornithology

            a wayward diviner of hearsay youth
the positive feedback cycle

            between bird and prophet
in early

            phlegmatic accumulation
caprice of the humors

            begets the first
skeptics

            shades
dampen outside delphi

            the murmuring
corvids gathered like rat kings

            around the temple
feathers sloughed

            birdseed script
accusations of aberrance

            invisible as olympus
as though the rookery

            could be
such a thing

            and so
the library of

            black wings cannot call for
a casual scribe

            icarian crow-talk
masses that a finger shushes

            bird feathers
beg documentation

            bookmark spiral and stair
all the way up

            to the tower rookery
the augur themselves

            in the shared aerie
hums a harmony

            to the refrain
nested for now

            within hollow bones
presuming this is the nadir

XXI. THE ORNITHOLOGIST

There’s not a prophet in this modern temple

With knowledge of the ornithologist’s new or old name.

Over two hundred years since she last augured

The auspices. Like her foremothers,

Scavenged buttons and meat-sticky bones from late

Kings stock the surgery shelves. The locked cabinets

Keep a collection of petrified beaks crushed with an alabaster pestle

To hide the evidence of an unintelligent adolescence—

A failed god’s revised history. The smog

Spreads still. Pesticides: promoted. Extinct Olympus,

What was the hypothesis behind the repeated ransacking of the rookeries?

Was there more to divine from the most recent wrecking than the Red

Scare or some similar species of moral panic? Propaganda and Satanic

Polytheism the bilious folk brand her

Message to clap a chokehold on this epoch’s ornithic hunting season.

As though to clip enough wings could anoint anyone clean, virally

Impervious, fit to rule

Out any scrupulous science. The ornithologist revises the inherited methods.

Regardless, over two centuries since her last act of augury

As far as the self-lauded skeptics are concerned. Count the future generations

Lucky should they have the means to better reincarnate the ornithologist’s

Experiments, should there be birds to keep. On wings and hollow bones

Earth stores a thousand libraries of Alexandria. Augury:

The uppermost stratum on the hierarchy of needs. The prerequisites are plain—

A grocery list, an occasional solar eclipse, a climate

Action plan, food, water, shelter, perch,

Safety, a national bird protection act. So long as the birds—

Crows, ravens, jays, magpies, and the rest—so long as they withstand

The ransacking, the ornithologist’s iterations

Will have shelter. Meanwhile, she migrates from rookery to aerie on tiptoe.

Contagions call quorum. They scrounge this quarter century. The corvids continue

To spare fewer and fewer of their looking glass feathers.