From the Fishouse

listen to the flock of grackles praising the just softening
fig, the disturbed hush brushed back by their wings,

the placid spiral of their hovered beaks bleating out
a black gravity, say the tree, say the fig’s altar,
say the mute sugar invoking its seed, dark skin

purpled from green, say a woman whose eyes
close against their clawed and feathered descent,

a brutal harvesting, a hewn heart, the frictive
branches craggy in their upward reach. say here

is a bird, an animal that receives a feathered happening,
listens to the flocked emergence in its throat, imagined

by a woman whose brown eyes bloom inward
like the fig’s implosive ripening or
assumption billowed in a velvet robe.

here is her mouth that opens like a fig.
listen to its plum valediction confess to be yours.