A Dog Shit Poem
for Alli Warren and Catherine Meng

I am incubating some dog shit in the yard,
next to the dead bird and its wing. My gaze
is tugging on one and then the other.
When I come out the next morning the pile of shit
is bigger than the message of complaint that's left
in my mailbox by the neighbor, even
though it's his dog that put it there
for the sake of poetry. The bird has
nothing to do with poetry, the wing
even less so, its only function being
to point to the shit on the lawn.