Addie Palin

Simulacrum in Thistle Seed

Between our whispering throats
in a turmeric language,
finches, rattling through the grey

hemisphere into your small hands.
Drawn to your hollow bones, they lift
you as you are one of them, lakeward,

while I sit very still with my questions
vapor in my mouth. How does one
navigate the world without clairvoyance?

I comb the mercury shores
silvery in my footing and crooning, drawing
smokestack breaths beneath the coppery

bending of air, beneath the absent finch-
drawn carriage of you, while gulls make
calm white buoys among the whitecaps.

I settle in my helpless abscess of you,
the ordinary evasions which I cannot
conduct; finding honey-filled jars or humming

of bourbon, just stumbling. And when
the finches migrate again between
electrical poles I see these crossings

don't belong to me, only vacant
evening light. A song plays
sung in your voice, not a warble, not

yellow pinpoint or even bright, says
I don't know how to be lossless, though you
were the slightest, briefest and lightest.