Brown Pelican

by Andrea Wyatt

these days, stretched like desert,
sun-blinded.
abandoned earth, its gray fruit, winter.

animals leave the dead ground,
torn mountain, for the sea;
dead deer in the leaves,
fish heads on rock,
hundreds of small, dying animals
on the edge of the sea, in a glare
of light and dark and light and
dark.

your fingers too clumsy to heal,
your fingers moving too slowly
over the brown bodies, the black
bodies, the soft wings.

rainbow—
in dark oils.

we lie in the sun together,
reading about the buffalo,