The Language of a Marriage

In my lap, The Awakening rests like a pretension.
Lately, I’ve found myself going in envy
of fiction—not as a poet, but as a woman
living a linear life, as she must with no parrot
screaming foreshadow in its raucous patois:
Allez vous-en! Get Out! Sapristi! Goddamn it!
No one is in danger of death in this poem, yet,
I resent the birdsong outside my windows—
they’ve never offered any instructive imperatives.
A decade’s worth of contrapuntal rasps and trills
have done nothing but call down each morning
because foreshadow is fiction’s delicious privilege
in full plumage and reality’s only creative
device is hindsight, a bewilderment of vagrant birds.