Last night, after months away from home,
a lapwing piercing the still dark still
with its warnings. Language, perhaps,
began like this. A campfire. One person
to keep watch, who would have needed
something to sound danger. A word like   Tiger!
Air strike!   Run!   And once the words entered
they were unstoppable, dragging dirt into the hallways
of our brains, pitching tents to watch sunsets over the graying
swamp. We had learned by then to make cleavers and picks,
tools to carve the scavenged flesh off bison and mammoths.
Language and violence proceeding together. It was only later,
in the flowering, armed with lorgnettes in the garden,
that we could say things like Go and give the ass a drink
of wine to wash down the figs. Or Will spend time preening
after copulation. When we lie down, you and I, our backs
against the scrape of ground in this rain-fed open country,
all the shrapnel-burst horrors of the year unable to be named
and so unable to pass from plowed fields of heart
to limb, to throat. We let go. Lift our legs to the sky
as though they could hold up the heavens. Meaning
recedes. In Armenian, a way to say I love you is
I want to eat your liver. In Arabic, I want you to bury me.
I want you to walk on my eyelashes. Feel the retreat
of thick sea ice collapse across our bodies. The ancestors
of lapwings—they had feathers for a million years
before ever using them to fly. Our tongues.
Monarchs in the cradles of our mouths.
Now scream. Now sing.

This is drawn from “Egrets, While War.”