The Starlings of Bridgeport
Above the city that burned
and burned and was rebuilt with lights
that bounce off the atmosphere
and yellow the sky, casting out the stars,
the starlings rise.
With wings spread
they darken the night again,
and feathers, lit at the tips,
spark like dying embers.
They create constellations
and call out new compositions to each other.
No one understands why.
They have risen from the ashes
of a wild city that burned years ago
and were buried beneath foundations
of brick and concrete.
Every night, just before the city sleeps
the starlings call out
and a memory might respond.
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Metamorphosis
Low, the profile she kept,
her body low to the ground,
her ears low to the ground.
Maria Sibylla Merian,
an odd creature,
headed off to Surinam
to study spirits of the mud
animals that appeared through
spontaneous generation,
devil’s hands pulling them forth.
In the jungles her middle age,
her corsets, her heavily layered skirts
hampered discovery.
Hems caught on the undergrowth
and held her down,
so she stitched new dresses,
lighter than those leftover
from her civilized life.
For two years she learned the land.
She relied on her daughter,
whose skin, damp with the tropical air,
must have felt prickled as
palm fronds brushed
the back of her neck
as she followed her mother
deeper into the forests.
Together, they examined
the butterflies,
how they changed through
nature, how they flourished
in the levels of the rainforest,
emerging from cocoons as little more
than memories of bark
or patches of the light
that fought its way through
the dense canopies above.
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1637, Tulipomania & the Dutch Economy
When those new green shoots broke the ground after the frost abated,
the tulip breeders waited,
the flower to follow was new, bright,
white petals ablaze,
streaked in oxblood
as if they had been painted.
No one had ever seen such a bloom.
To own the thing, to possess it,
there were investors willing to spend much,
a flower that could buy a house,
a flower that could feed families.
No one predicted it, no one could have known,
a virus broke those colors like a fever.
Ill bulbs dying inside and spreading sickness
an entire economy taken down
with the browning stem and falling head of a tulip.
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