Whirlygig

I always saw four wings spinning and wondered
at the species of bird, butterfly winged (but someone

will tell me that butterflies have eight wings, or twenty,
or only one) and blue. The cat is feathered down

his front legs in those layers, like a small, albino
Farrah Fawcet plastered to them. My brother

had a poster, all hair and teeth, all gold
as anyone can be gold, and that reminds me

of the rumor of a dead woman needing
a dime of bare skin on her gold-painted torso,

or dying to the clangor of a host of church bells,
and Scout and Bombadil and the handmaid

and the Wife of Bath, and they spin and spin
and here I am, counting wings, and pages

and the creep of my refractive error and an ugly
inability to blend all those feathers into flight.