Death on a Sunday

The first warm day of spring rips through the snowbanks.
On the rooftop of a corner store, six of us meditate,
amateur buddhas in heat sucked from the sun.
I lose myself in pronouns. When we come back to 
we find a pigeon, long dead, belly up in the corner. 
Its toes are curled and scaly like an alien's might be. 
Flecks of whitish flesh burst from its feathers, 
like oats soaked in water, sprouting, alive. 

We put it in a plastic bag and march straight to the lake,
infinite and tundra-like, to hold a water burial.  
Without ceremony we dump the bird out of its
plastic shroud and watch it splash into the little stream
that twists through bergs of snow into the lake.
The current flips the pigeon belly up and minutes pass;
we watch it, like a beacon, pass from view. 

Home on my front porch, I watch the red of sunset
spread like a rash on the skin of the sky. 
The warmth leaves my flesh, spreads into the air,
and the day, complaisant to the dark, ends without precision.