Edward Schelb   BLUEPRINT FOR A SISTINE CHAPEL OF BIRDS My birds are in need of restoration, like Giotto’s figures in the basilica of St. Francis. Scrape off the years of dirt and you might find the kingfisher to be a grackle, its plumage shining like a drowned sun. Even Michaelangelo’s blues turn to copper-green, unstable azurite slowly bled of its celestial hue, though its form does not change, -- the rosettes or geodes inverted that persists as the light deepens. Plates in bird-guides do not mutate their colors, though their scale deceives: you can cradle a kingfisher in your hand, its energy so compressed that it should collapse like a star and leave black holes along hidden creekbeds. Our finches begin to hatch after we quit playing chants night after night, songs penetrating the bird-womb, the Lotus Sutra ossifying into hollow bone, liquefying into albumen. After the second brood I began to imagine cages to house them all, a wall of cages in which the birds could swarm like gnats. No room for books, only wire and seed, a Talmud of birds. Last night a single bird escaped – a female finch the color of chalk flew up into the cedar, perching on a matted tangle of branches on its lower trunk. You left the cage door open, hoping it would return to its nest, a true act of faith, though we know how such acts end. They mudlark, that piquant word from canal barges stuck in low water. The cage remained empty. We should nestle the others under our tongue for safekeeping. A pentecostal incubator – some seeds will perish, fall on dry ground to be swallowed by birds, excreted on a scraggly bush. But some will flourish, bearing no resemblance to my idea of bird-flight, tangled knots in a vast fabric of light.   Copyright © 2005 by Edward Schelb. All rights reserved.