Passerines

I walk the flight line after a nightlong sandstorm, which had fluttered

sparrows to me, offerings now without wingbeats, sparrows overturned in unison

with the linnets that sprouted shrunken legs, curled in like a dead spider,

defeathered. I am accosted by the whitethroat dead in a dried puddle’s outline,

in the hopeful refuge of. Something arrives and goes through their hearts.

I bring myself within earshot of  a songless nightingale, where thick heat props open

the beak to a tongue’s taste of  rasp. I’m in no dream, having not seen a sandgrouse swift

with water in feather. What do I have? No chiffchaff left alive, but the 
fragrance of one

under a trailer in gravel hidden from the summer attitude. I kneel to the one shrub

grown from the air conditioner’s slow drips of  water, where a crested lark won’t age

with me, but will take heat to its blood, take on the dead’s role to haunt

and attend me—shrike, wren, wheatear, flycatcher—who will gather them.