Goldbarth’s Bird Rose

The brain’s a surveyor.
You can’t keep it focused
On anything too long.

It needs to make models
And continually
Update bits and corners.

Meanwhile, the shadows move.
To you, they seem to jump.
The world is a songbird

Foraging in the skull
Of a horse. It will fly
And surprise the poet—

A bird from a horse skull!
Later, he will use it
As an image for joy

At a tough day’s closure,
Compare it to the brain.
But the brain’s not the bird,

Not even the cupped skull.
The brain is what’s startled
When the world informs it

It needs to change its mind,
Its model of a world
Without birds within skulls.