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"Bird Skull" by Lee Shippey. Oil on canvas, 1984.

Second Wind
 
1. Bird Skull: a painting by lee shippey
 
It lies slantwise on a vivid scarf,
creamy, ashen, fog-colored bone
against sunset purple fabric
with petals and pods of lavender
touched orange.
 
This eggshell-thin cranium
rendered larger than my own--
any act of attention
turns to love?  Who would
embrace doubt alone?
 
Bird beyond vocabulary
whose thoughtless brain
weighs little, flies nowhere
if not in the second wind
of naming.
 
2. “Because such fingers need to knit
that subtle knot”
 
Our love at first was simple
flame, rooted in air,
consuming the night.
 
Now it feels more
the heat from below, tangled
roots our inspiration:
 
how we learned thorn and weed,
roadside extravagance
of this walk in time.
 
River of speech, fire in the clay,
second wind of the flesh
cleaving to its own, its other:
 
what classic humors
let us breathe what we know,
knitting our knot again.
 
So if I say I love you
it’s not all I intend
but what you understand,
 
transfigured, ripening,
weed among clustered weeds
as I am you are.
 
3. Memento Vivari
 
Yet if bone on this scarf
is fossil action, halted flight,
it’s also the life of seeing
 
for you, painting it,
and for me, reflecting:
fabric so flat it’s not even
 
background but imperial sky, emblem
and taste of Eve and Adam’s
communion--the skull rises
 
from itself, as if our world
were all foreground, all detail,
and air we feel feathering by
 
is not first speech anymore
but the shaded, intricate
second wind enduring.

      Second Wind. Texas Tech University Press,  1990; c. 1989