"The Buzzard and Reversal" (Michael Bazzett)

"The Buzzard and Reversal"
(Michael Bazzett)


I.

That hooked beak
finds scent and carves
circles above it—

tilting on airy
ridges and shifting
planes and panels, it

leans on one wing,
ascribes the invisible
architecture of rising

air then closes like a door and
falls toward a softness
soon to be opened.

II.

In the dream, there are rabbits. Quiet as ever,
but crowded and jostling round the fallen buzzard.

They ignore the clover where the bird fell, dipping instead
into the dark thatch of feathers with their busy nibblings,
with their tiny snipping teeth. The impossible

softness of their fur is caked with blood. The bird is
broken: a collapsed umbrella. Its naked head emerges
and turns to watch itself drawn shining into the light.


"The Buzzard and Reversal" by Michael Bazzett appears online in the current issue of Pleiades, presented by the University of Central Missouri. Bazzett lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children, and his young daughter may be an aspiring writer:  "I remember reading Dr. Seuss at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, and she was pointing at each word, asking, “What does this word say?” “Cat.” “What does this word say?” “Hat.” She paused and seemed a little flummoxed, then asked, “What does this word say to the other word?” That gave me pause, that fresh conception of language. And it delighted me that someone who’d been on the planet for twenty-some months could essentially define syntax while awaiting a spring roll."