STILL LIFE, MOUTH OF THE VISTULA

6 4 Y S T I L L L I F E , M O U T H O F T H E V I S T U L A D A N I E L B O U R N E After a while the bird starts to twist to turn this way and that as if to show me every side so I can better understand the fact it is dead. But it wasn’t the cigarette pack of Cristals or the styrofoam bobbing nearby, yellow as chicken fat, that made the webbed feet of the krżyzówka seem so relaxed as they paddled the current of the Vistula, the water here on the befuddled edge, as in the fast middle, just trying to make it to the sea – its northern migration along the slippery wall of laid stones only nineteenth-century Prussians could make, and my own wet and precarious perch. No, it was not styrofoam that came to rest in its mouth. Something else must have killed it, some quick blow to the head or a more slow and complicated dying before it tucked its head in to one shoulder and drifted closer to the shore. 6 5 R We circle each in our own eddy, and I wish I could at least see its eyes, its mouth. Not that it would need to speak, but that there would be a message left to salvage. The wreckage of even this contaminated poem. And the species? I note the brown and gray striping – but the feathers may have changed in death. And how to distinguish head from body no matter how much this creature bobs, coaxing me to keep on talking to find my own words and Baltic Sea. – Sometimes death collects in one place only: the feathers finally giving up the ghost of flight . . . – Sometimes death collects in one place only: black cormorant on a pylon spreading shit and wings to dry . . . ...