Invisible Birds

Water boils in the kettle. A slow buildup to steam. The house cat, on the other hand, chases invisible birds around the house, while I impatiently sit, waiting to make a quick cup of decaf before running a few errands around the village. She leaps and twists behind me, shifts between my legs, careens down the hallway, howls at the back door— distracting me from the blank papers. Fields of winter.
•••

•••I know there is a power in delay. In procrastination. —but recently, after months of avoiding the thousands of scrapped poetry lines, fragmented images, and erratic enjambments which are gathered loosely together in an old composition notebook, I finally begun weaving and braiding more fractured material into a collage of impressions, hoping to shift away from last month’s slow motioning.
•••Meanwhile, something rots quietly in the refrigerator. The smells of decay lift out the instant one opens the main compartment—but I cannot trace the source. Hourly, it intensifies, deepens with urgency. Another distraction from the flow of intention.