Songbird + Fernando

songbirds wake twilight
waiting in obviousness
the rooster cackles

the gentle kiss on the eyes
of morning, a throated cough.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Fernando smokes a pipe. Last night we walked down a gravel road littered with slugs. The musk of his smoking reminds me of my grandfather despite my grandfather smoking camel lights. Fernando doesn’t speak english as his first language and has a wide stature built from pushing through life. What he conveys to me is the stress of work not driven by passion, work of survival, work of enablement. Fernando’s card is punched now and he allows himself to paint, to smoke his pipe across this french village in the countryside. As we walk and the gravel hums beneath our shoes, the stars start to appear, then I’ve lost him. My nose leading me, I find his form several paces back, chatting with a cow. Cow is also not Fernando’s first language. The cow moos back to him and through the smoke Fernando is understood.