The Black-Throated Grey Warbler and the Bewick’s Wren

One goes hopping through the scrub
Outside your door each morning and

The other trills from some invisible
Perch when you visit the mesa woods.

You like to think on how focused
Each is on its own vivid life, finding

Food and singing for whatever reason
(No one knows all the reasons—books

Have been written admitting this problem).
For whatever reason, you enjoy thinking

About other species’ lives and reasons.
The intensity of each of them, including

Whichever even smaller lives and rogue
Bits of your own flesh intend to eat you,

All of life aiming inward in a way, focused
On living through crowds of other lives,

Reminds you of how tokamaks focus
Their magnetic fields to constrain

The plasma that yields the fusion.
Another trill from somewhere in the trees,

Who have their own intensities, gives
You a little shiver, thinking, what if,

After fusion, the next most potent
Collapsing form of explosion is living?