Michiel Coxcie (1499-1592), Coleción de Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid

What must the painter have thought when the birds,

despite all parables and paint, began refusing

their pairings—their bright/dull dichotomies—when they refused

not to skim toward the edges of the canvas with their soft grey-

golden-blue-black anvil wings; when they refused—

even as Noah’s hand commanded—the clasp of ark

because the waters would surely never rise that far—

or if the waters rose that far, the ark would be gone,

and they’d remain above, cawing and crying and chirping

in disordered beauty: stork by stark red parrot, swift

by swallows by gulls by pelicans. Did he try, as he lashed

down rain in the east, to restrain them? To paint the horizon

as it was meant to be: divided—a flat, wrought line

with GOD above like an integer, as each other creature was

divided from all but one of itself? The vicuñas prancing

the narrow ramp in hoofed obedience—gangplank

to heaven, gangplank to cage—the lions with their

ruffled, comic faces, the rhinoceroses’ horn-tipped reverence,

the horses stepping two-by-two like troopless troops

decreed by He who had claimed the ledgers, the accounts,

the X of all X’s, the Very Big Force: the Rain Rain Rain—as the birds

swirled and dived like a spilled cornucopia as the birds stole

the eye away from order, as the birds cried, Look: an inundation

of air! sweeping from the painter’s brush like a ruffling tornado, v’ing toward mountains

(Why not just build aeries?), refusing the tidy seven pairs

they’d always been allotted. Who—says the birds—do you think you are

with all this thunder? Who first posed as the models for angels?

Yes, it will rain and rain and rain and rain and

fish will rise up, shining and fat with kelp and sea lettuce. Clams will grow

like drunk flowers. We’ll blur in our shapes—as already, some of us slip

in the distance from swans into something like heart-tridents, butterfly-

owls that hover and plummet—like the sun turns from circle to cone

to a burning stepped pyramid to green-red molten glass

each night as it crashes (there is nothing to fear here)

into the million ancient rainstorms of the ocean.