"the shadow of a bird / gone elsewhere"

Purple is fashionable twice
at this season (of lifting our heads)
- it is November, and I am with
the shadow of a bird
gone elsewhere now like a shield
across my own hollowed self
a red barn
where the hayropes hang like webs
and the starving sparrows sit
in the lofts
not chirping
for the new wings coming
up to roost.

Ed Dorn, from 'The Sparrow Sky', in Collected Poems, edited by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn (Carcanet, 2013)