I recognize a bird by its shadow over the grass.
Perhaps a swatch of color lures it into the yard,
or actual prey, an insect caught bright on a leaf.

Everything I see is camouflaged: moth a torchlit
maze, pool a glove the sun slides into, one finger
at a time. The Mongols thought a fern seed

made its bearer invisible, and Genghis Khan kept
such a seed in his ring, but it failed to cloak him
from his lovers or foes. Instead, the seed helped

him interpret the language of birds. Once a finch
told him to conquer the land of Xi Xia, so he did.
That was the old world but still a world with its

own exterior logic: birdsongs, incessant pests,
maneuvers in the garden. All these hours I pick
tomatoes, bury kelp and fish-heads in the ground.

Perhaps language will always be vestigial, a trail
of light in water. And rainfall an idiom. And birds
sermonic. I will be invisible here if I want to be,

among greenery and soil, where the compost burns.
I walk through my life like a king with a fern seed
under my tongue, beneath wings that shadow my body.