All the clouds seem to rise from the gray deadened south cap. They aren’t a bird,
but if they aren’t a bird, they are feathers,
the winged clouds, a frozen counter-phoenix,

blizzarding. The earth
a face it crosses like an expression,
glassed in its own helmet with O2.

Reading it would be a mistake,
like ascribing human motive
to a cat’s stare. If it says anything we can understand,
it says, food.

It is salty, like blood
but bitter.

Nectar, and ambrosia,
mostly gristle. Small globs of fat
linked by tendons. Sometimes I can’t stomach it.

Sometimes I am filled on its thirst.

It looks like a frosted drink,

or an apparition risen from the cask of winters.
The banished frost giants
are storming Valhalla for spirits,
spilling froth at their feet.

Because there is thirst, there is,
there is …

Kiss me Houston, with the threat in your teeth,
we are caught between kinds of bird.

Mucilaginous and clotted,
half-dry and rising from pyres,
sucking on its fingers, Earth.

It’s an ice age thawing in steam.
Then it’s a penguin, gawky on the powder.

Waddling, tipsy,
seeming unable to grasp its own locomotion, it spills
up to the lip of an ice gap,

becomes slick,

bullet in the water.
Feral, justified,
half sinking torpedoed through the gloom.

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