By Bruce Weigl

Featured Art: Two Plant Specimens by William Henry Fox Talbot

The anonymous brown song bird
        is annoying in her insistence
             on repeating the same three syllables
in exactly the same way, endlessly.

        She must know something
             about inevitability,
                       to sing so long,
        no one else in sight.

        The persistence of nature;
         the blind and infinite dedication to a thing
                       in the face of emptiness and silence
        that won’t let you believe that you are the last.