Answer

How much of what we build is couched in an envy of birds?
Although our steps fall-catch, fall-catch, we don’t locomote
with the startling drop, the swoop from branch to ground.

I could only hold a goldfinch in my hand because he crashed
into my kitchen window and died. Highlighter yellow, dignity
of curled claw, still open eye. Hard lesson of weightlessness

on my palm. I feed the songbirds every morning and see
risk-safety calculations they cannot make. Our babies are born
expecting the us of ten thousand years ago and must learn

to metabolize the losses of modernity. But all the goldfinch
ancestors know this is a monstrous task and they keep calling,
keep calling, keep calling, calling us all the way back home.