The Ornithologist

I ask if the possibility of our own extinction
gives him grief, but he cares only about the nature

of copulation. The ease with which wetness
can be drawn from a body makes me question

my own consistency—am I lipid or oil? Alkaline or acid.
Butter or soap, this smeared sheet. If saponified,

I could wear down to the shape of his fingers in a week.
I could slip down the shower like a mangled dove

while he lists the advantages of warm blood, hollow bones.
The advantage of sleeping with an ornithologist

is that pillow talk includes the consistency of dinosaur feathers,
how each one began as a downy chick. Everything starts soft

and ugly. I ask his favorite bird and cardinal
‍disappoints me, until he reminds me that in Brazil

cardinals are as outlandish as Alcovasaurus orapple-picking.
Inch by inch, he maps our shared reptilian roots—

I learn ducks have vaginal labyrinths.
I learn swallows fuck falling through sky.

Sometimes, I wish he would speak a language less human,
less Portuguese, more dithering in reeds, or fluttering of knees,

but sometimes his mouth is as precise as dissection. Plucked bare,
my shape soft and ugly-lovely. Beauty is arbitrary,

but quantifiable, and will always outrank survival.
This is his favorite thing to say.

The second is that cardinals smear their feathers with ants,
living and dead. No one knows why, but we have to believe

in the inevitable. He does not grieve the rain
dark against the window as he traces his migration

south, knowing the exact amount of wetness
that makes birds fall from the sky. I coo like a tangled

swallow as he probes my warmth, my downy feathers,
fingering my gooseflesh as if he knows what comes next.