Spring Forms a Choir

A bird’s flying by, going “skitta skitta skitta.”
I feel I’ve mastered a new language when I say
to the man selling coffee, “skitta skitta skitta,”
but he looks at me like my left eye is a lava lamp.
Because my right eye is a hookah, this facial relationship
is not without possibilities straight out of 1960,
when I was born. Returning to my home piece of air,
the “skitta skitta skitta” bird is gone, another
makes a sound like sheet metal at the far end
of a factory being moved by a man 100 pounds
too light to wrestle with the Industrial Revolution.
I raise my coffee cup to this song
of the disappearing manufacturing base. It begins
to rain, I begin to like the sheenier,
sexier appearance of the maple, there’s an arrest warrant
in the groin of what I’m feeling. Now, inside the rain,
I hear the bird that sings “chink chink chink”
like it’s making fun of my friend Thomas Chang
from Shanghai. Thomas says, when I call him
to confess nature’s xenophobia, don’t worry about it.
There’s a bird in Shanghai that seems to warble
“asshole American tourist” and you don’t
take that personally, now do you? I don’t,
only the bird who goes “ding” gets to me, suddenly
it’s dinnertime or the 12th round and I’m in a ring
with a man who has my blood on his gloves
like he’s an artist painting, painting away
at my demise.