Beneath the grattage of his dapper Dada
I will always believe in
the red-headed bird-king’s beak,
a cardinal decalcomania peeling
from the seams of his degenerate artist’s coat.
When he fled his bare-feathered nest
to sculpt the high desert,
he was collaged already
with childhood’s talons and quills.
Solarized, enrobed in a lover’s ambiguity,
he scratched through paint thickening
like the glassy crust of time
until it shattered beneath him,
as one day beneath us all.
He flies forever in skies of fossilized ocean,
eluding the traps of airplanes, the forest at last.

© 2023 Sonya Taaffe