the gigans: xi.

listen to the flock of grackles praising the just softening
fig, the disturbed hush brushed back by their wings,

the placid spiral of their hovered beaks bleating out
a black gravity, say the tree, say the fig’s altar,
say the mute sugar invoking its seed, dark skin

purpled from green, say a woman whose eyes
close against their clawed and feathered descent,

a brutal harvesting, a hewn heart, the frictive
branches craggy in their upward reach. say here

is a bird, an animal that receives a feathered happening,
listens to the flocked emergence in its throat, imagined

by a woman whose brown eyes bloom inward
like the fig’s implosive ripening or
assumption billowed in a velvet robe.

here is her mouth that opens like a fig.
listen to its plum valediction confess to be yours.