Now that you have staked their skeletons,

eyed the scope of a throat, prodded

strutted white ribs, pinched

a wishbone for resilience, thumbed

a keeled sternum's edge still trying

to steer scattered feathers, stroked

a hummingbird's mum iridescence, ruffed

the white down of a great egret

slit and stuffed as last year's final project,

sprinted with a severed wing to catch

the physics, given new vision

to a blackbird with two dabs of cotton,

you can leave with an A in class Aves.

Now that you have looked through birds, you see

the diagrammatic movements of geese

across the blue sky, dotted lines

narrowing a million years. You expect

from every American goldfinch thistles

and sadness, and when you walk out

among the world's perches and Latinate streaks

at the edge of sight, the air is feathers

measuring the bones of your face.