Bellbird vernacular

Yellow-beaked darters sun themselves
christlike upon mooring poles.
Pied cormorants preen their wings,
small levitations. You’d have loved

the cygnets swirling their downy
calligraphy over the lake. You’d
have loved the lake—how everything
floats and drains in its together world.

Two white ducks, likely escaped
from a yard, nest under the sphagnum
roots of tea trees. Silver gulls.
A wading spoonbill. If I was to

sieve the space between us, I’d find
a video of you from your birdwatching
days, deep in the bush, tawny eyes
locked on the wisp of a lyrebird’s tail.

There’d be fresh dates and walnuts,
dishes stacked beside an empty sink.
Your head on my shoulder, asleep
through the final scene of a slow film

in your mother’s language. Early on,
you taught me how to say your name
the proper way, the i nearing an e,
the k surrendering its consonance

to an alternative our bodies never
could quite locate, though we tried.
I tell it to the ducks, who have
no dialect beyond the lightness

of their bodies. A boy on a scooter
thunk-thunks along the boardwalk
and stops. He peers into the canopy
of bellbirds, searching for a source.