the orange bird watches me, the whole time

Zixiang Zhang

i.
he’s wired to the awning,
twilight parading around his orange relieved from duty, 
perched by the boy who’s milling dandelions in early evening sun, though time denudes his youth in wet latitudes, marigolds having crossed the day before, 
than a parakeet 
blueing in the cage
for his object of desire across the sea: my inner sphere, his dereliction whilst marled, with our orange friend drifting downcurrent. 
kisses me, he is the object of my citruses.

orange bird watches me, the whole time
i am marred by junipers, pinenes leached into sacramento headwaters, aiming to incapacitate my comrade in fall, bill my love, and the hydroxyapatites
we share— 
an orange bird the whole time
gathers his hand by feet by hand, to garnish with fish cartilage the mouth of his untrembling shoulder, feet
first, then hand, to watch me, who’s using to being with bird.

orange the whole time he lends me a shroud, seeing day fall. 
as my time is fleeting and seasons chase their tails, so curtail me, you watching bird.
the whole time you loved, the whole time— 

ii.
everyone looks up to the atmosphere’s lilac. spring feasts on your gaze from which light is drawn to the veins of a leaf,
in the trunk of being without witness, everybody else looks up
to see the orange bird and black breastplates
strapped to the body of a cherry
that takes a freeze to bleed sweet. the whole time it is growing, it is being

while out there, the sun descending to its lowest arc, beveled against a butte, and bird,
orange and sand-covered, watches twilight untimely…

iii.
watch me watch the bird from the orchard’s overlook, orange sun bled 
yellow and stunned
citrus bulbous, his eyes porous & asimmer. 

leaves shed the bird. 
weather balloons and falls. little talons under his breasts grasp the timberline and above, his vision hollowed out of nest, from which to see
stars take flight, the orange fleeing 
the bird; i peel away to rest.

iv.
i’m in kissimmee;
planting an orchard once the bird 
leaves fall, his turmoil
tomorrow.

The Science

I am red-green colourblind, my sensory cones defective, and Fall is the time of my vanishings: green leaves flash into brown while red, orange, and yellow seemingly materialise out of the thinning verdant lip of our earthen jar to mostly end up on market shelves. Orange is the crepuscular colour, the transitional state between rest and alarm, the sign of carotene compounds (as orange as I could see), and me watching a log burn on television while winter light hugs the ground. In the Northern Hemisphere, oranges mature starting in the end of Fall as daylight ebbs, then floods across the subtropics. Is the orange bird a labour of my congenital blindness or shadow play in flux with the angle of solar incidence? The whole time I’m pondering, watching for an orange bird.

The Poet

Zixiang Zhang (he/him) is a poet and Earth science teacher in Queens, New York. He received his B.S. in Geology from Stanford University and studied fossils of the ancestral American pronghorn before moving into the classroom. His writing is grounded in his coming of age in the American West and sundry sensory pleasures. He can be reached at zixiangzh [at] gmail [dot] com.

Next poem: The Scientist at Giverny by E. B. Smith, Jr.