Ode Called Where
(For those this week who have gone there)

Where do the birds go to die?
There should be great stacks,
whole pyramids of bird corpses, and others
pyramids of different kinds corresponding
to the likeness of all of them, the animals
all the sea of things that breathe,
there they are somewhere and somewhere.....
They go there to sleep in that eternity,
a statue place where monuments cover
the avenue in shade and formula, the girl
with a hoop runs towards that point
following the shadows she has learned
by touch, the man with a tall hat tipped slightly,
avoids his journey by standing like that, an arc
made of bird feathers on the cloth of bird skin
where they've all gone to simply be, flattened
into the thought that light is transparent
as much as the flight of where they go.
Watch how they go there all the time, watch
through the trees,
the descent,
the vanishing.


**Michele Canty of the US writes of a young moderator of "Shia Chat" who suddenly collapsed from heart attack at age ?21. Here in Beirut, a woman only two years older than myself died suddenly (the same day) after arriving to the ER at the American University of Beirut complaining of a "stomach ache". She is survived by one son and her husband. And this is for anyone else, on any given day of any given month that goes there. This poem is based on my favorite painting (and everyone else's) by Giorgio DeChirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street.

Death is the only democracy.

May they all rest in perpetual peace and freedom.