Image credit: Donald Zirilli

	The Poet Who Hates Birds stands in his Zen garden, craving silence. He imagines the mouth from which a staccato song erupts, thickened to a straight line, unable to smile, Geometry, no feeling. He wishes to scratch upon the sitting stone as he practices his words, careful incorporeal seeds that, once sown by his tongue, will sound like nothing so much as the interwoven cries of two Pie-billed Grebes, aroused by Spring.