The Ornithologist Poems / Carol Berg

    Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in Sou’wester, The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Pebble Lake Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, qarrtsiluni, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere.    Her chapbook, Her Vena Amoris (Red Bird Chapbooks), is available and her chapbook, Ophelia Unraveling is available from Dancing Girl Press.         The Ornithologist Is Collecting The Dark    under the bird wing. And then there is the beautiful and long-lasting damp unknown. The birds so trusting when she asks why.   All day she waits in the swallows’ strangeness their bones clicking out the air’s years like some trapped   abacus moving the blue beads. The hour floating as she picks out the alula feathers the uppertail coverts the underwing coverts the flank.   The breathing and the pull of relaxation. Buoyancy of a coil. Within an s shaped neck of the heron a dark upstairs and a blizzard.   The nuptial plumes hardest to pull. Like the inviolate dream where he kissed her and she can’