For so long, I envied the engineering of birds.
Descendants of dinosaurs, original refugees,
they survived millions of years on this planet,
saw it burn and rise from its delicious burning.
They saw the first humans, the first civilizations,
Eve in the garden with Adam, her industrious
resolve, his ignorance not even aware of its
ignorance, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil towering over them. They were there,
perched among the vermillion branches, talons
digging into its bark, beaks already shoved into
its sweet and sour fruit. Birds, who knew more
about humanity than humanity, who revealed
to us, to Charles Darwin, our lore of evolution,
of natural selection, that great myth, survival
of the fittest, I envied your proximity to history
during ninth grade physics, when Mr. Majors
had our class build and launch bottle rockets
on the soccer field to master the key properties
of gravity, of aerodynamics, though I’m sure
he knew we’d never be masters of anything,
not even our bodies, our primary sin. Still, I
memorized you, your kingdom and phylum,
your extraordinary design. I figured you out
so well I didn’t need to copy off of Stephanie’s
exam, kept quiet when Mr. Majors caught her
passing answers to someone else and expelled
her to the principal’s office, made an example
of her the way Adam shamed Eve for seeking
and comprehending what he didn’t, the way,
later that year, we shamed the biology teacher
for reportedly sneaking off with the geometry
teacher, because we were just kids unfamiliar
with love, what it presents as, what it could
mean. Birds, I envied you so deeply I forgot
the anathema of wings, of always thrusting
forward through the always changing world
untethered and homeless, unable to touch
or hold another hand, to feel inside a wound
and cauterize it. I forgot the pain of harboring
an ancient intelligence, even as I walk by you,
pigeons scavenging popcorn outside The Pearl,
all those summers on my way to a laboratory
on North Broad Street in Philadelphia, where
I cultured DU145 brain cells in petri dishes
the size of quarters with fetal bovine serum
containing special plasma proteins inhibiting
the adhesion of cell surface receptors found
responsible for malignant prostate cancer, split
them with the tip of my mechanical pipet to test
if they might metastasize and migrate like boat
people across the divide or resign to apoptosis,
cell death. Hypothesis: if neurons in my brain
aren’t replaced when they die, then I’ll never
forget the hand sliding open the shower door,
the hand pointing to a bed in a cold garage,
the hand tightening a belt around my neck
or groping me in a crowded nightclub, fingers
thick and salty in my mouth. The independent
and dependent variables being what? Birds,
I envied you precisely because of that part
of me never wanting to be touched again.
Did I learn nothing from you in high school,
in Ms. Garcia’s English class, where we read
Homer and Ovid, who told me of Philomela,
taken by Tereus into the woods and raped,
her tongue cut, her body left there to spoil
until the gods turned her into a nightingale,
a swallow, tongueless birds with and without
song, wandering the world to testify, to name
her assault and her assailant. I’m not saying
I deserve divine mercy. I’m saying, perhaps,
like Eve, like Philomela, I too wanted prayer
and protest, salvation and suffering, Heaven
brutal and beautiful as Hell, all the provinces
of human experience, freedom and the folly
of freedom, the fallacy of image and science.
I wanted the fruit inside the fruit, succulent
seed I bury in soft ground to grow another
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
another Orchard of Knowing and Unknowing,
where I run naked but for my snakeskin coat,
my feathered hair, where I run through wind
so fast I become wind, and it feels like flying.