There are some other things in the painting
that I didn’t see the first time around.
The hull of a car. The trash scattered in the air.
And scholars thought they were birds. I kind of did too.
After all this time, goodbye
to all that and this and that.
I hope the insects become magnetic,
to eat plastic hillsides, to pull a drone down, even.
It might even be a collage, now that I look.
What does any of this even mean?
What is there in the world that we do not say goodbye to?
Goodbye to war? A scholar once said that war makes us rhyme
with each other. And music is the fluttering trash
in the collage or painting or whatever
we want to call it. It is under glass so I place
my face up against the reflection and wait for it to pull me inside.