Fracture and Regelation Theory

Where species overlap (sympatric, simpático), songs evolve
               and diverge, no I without you
  distant, or strange—so this fallen male I hear (a female
       would be nearly silent, a mere
          wing flick)
                 low in the bush, his
                 body's fluted drum

what sings, not the flawed wings' scrim of rain meshed
      in black wire's lace, what crowding or chemicals' fine veil
   twisted, trapping him (dogday cicada, harvestfly)

in flightless emergence. Late summer
              is a vibration of air, the world
   humming; my observation, the field
      where row after row of the chemically mutated

line up, pin through thorax, pin
              through thorax—My freeze
   doesn't fool him; he cuts off,
                   stranded
far from the canopy's chorus evolution
meant him to reach by blood's
              hydraulic extension inflating and

lifting his wings. As amulets of jade, secreted
          under the stilled tongue, once they marked hope
     for rising, the past misting away
                to a scarf so transparent it

can't be seen, finer even than that cloth before the weavers' thumbs
              were amputated, a crimson sari pulled entire
       through a wedding ring, finer than the soul

blooding the body, that delta of iron, of rust, vein
                to capillary: the rivered earth
     in aerial view, dendritic map
       of the valley grained in the trunk beneath the crackling

abandoned skin: Magnolia grandiflora, its own range
     narrowed and pared (climate change,
                glaciation) while beetles droned
            after huge, moon-white flowers, acorns
                     going off like distant
buckshot in the reservoir—

                   All things near
in their loss. Sun in the fist of trees, chapel bells rack up
              the elegiac number while the dying goes on in un-

memorialized silence and the dead drift
       into overgrown margins, scrub
   of sumac and pine,
           flicking their failed wings—