Caboter

"Homonymy kills the king."

We wish too vaguely. The day
Is an animal that knows
Destiny searches for it.
Death's a return to being,
A mixture of excitement
And despair, leading nowhere
For those emotions themselves.

I am watering the lawn,
Moon high in warm desert sky,
Cliffs like red radiators
Glowing a little with loss
Of the sun that made them glow.
This was last summer, of course,
Summer smoldering, dying,

When starlings came to the lawn
And I thought how I admire
Invasive species. I know,
They've been introduced by fools.
But to a rat or a finch
What was the difference between
Reaching an island by boat

Or being blown there by storms,
Misdirected by currents?
I'm all for diversity
And mourn native species' loss
Very hypocritically,
But still I'm struck by the pluck
Of marauding berserkers.

They've beaten long odds, you know.
Natives mostly win the day.
But once a few maniac
Breeders get going, they can
Crash through whole ecosystems.
Us, too, of course, all of us,
First or last, sailing nowhere

Or poking along the coast.
A few of us, enough, thrive,
And then we seem dangerous
To ourselves. Mm. Never mind.
With oracular hindsight
Any way coming to grief
Can be claimed for destiny.

The king heard the oracle
And carefully avoided
The wrong place with the same name.
Two thousand years later, truth
Sounds easily: Loss was lost.
That was back in the summer.
Who knows where we nowhere now?