Les Funérailles des Oiseaux

The fountain in Quinconces was built in eighteen ninety-four

And features a quadriga of oxidized copper fish-steeds

Who rear upwards, their eyes wild in terror or exhilaration

Spewing water from flared nostrils into the pool below

Leading them with raised scepter

A woman, adorned in laurels

Her unyielding stare kilometers ahead

A few men and women pause to watch the action unfold

Dressed in corsets and top-hats,

they stand separated from the water by a looped iron fence

And I, from another time,

Gaze at their shadowed backs

Immortalized in black and white

The slideshow moves on, and I with it

An hour afterward and I’ve left that quiet museum

I now stand where they stood, dwarfed by those barrel-chested stallions

Whose rippling muscles quietly dissolve into scales

Beside the tramway’s grooves

That hug the bleached stone steps of Quinconces

I notice a pigeon lying in the grass

Its slender neck a newspaper’s crease

Its half-lidded eye a two-toned stone

Its splayed wing the epicenter of a snowstorm of down

Comrades brave the cold to pay their dues

They peck and peck

and beat their wings like cymbals

But the fallen soldier does not stir

Am I no better than a pigeon

Pecking at the past?

The sound of bells, and

A tram comes round the bend —

Les funérailles des oiseaux 

The copper steeds

The regal maiden —

All slip from sight