—The Guardian, May 6, 2021

They’re perching on my roof like birds of prey;
Forget that simile on second thought:
They are all birds of prey. No ominous
Rote figuration matches these black birds,
The fact—red, wrinkle-throated fact—of them.
So few are left alive, and here they make
Their home: my asphalt roof, eight wildfires old,
My husband-hewn and hand-assembled deck,
Its peeling varnish superceded by
Their spattered, ghostly gauno gobs.
                                                                   These are
Too old for nevermore; they know what land
Was like before my house, my deck, my whole
Conception of a world. Perhaps they wait
For all this drywall, asphalt, husband-stuff,
To carbonize and slough. I wake to wings
On windows. Afternoons I stare out east,
Match the direction of their watchful beaks.
My every evening fades to feather-dusk
Beneath their fossilized, still-living watch,
And when in sleep I see the man-less lands,
The desert meadows where the mammoths heave,
Are these imaginings from me, or do
I dream the ice-age meaning of their speech?