Ultimate Scarecrow

to bring back the birds

Our penultimate scarecrow
is a machine woman with metal joints
and innards exposed to the dust.
While her unseeing porcelain face
gazes with vitrified eyes at her navel,
what propels the clock in her head?
A crow lands on the exposed circuits

and defecates, clogging the works.
The robot stops in her tracks, plastic feet
planted by a hedge in the hillside field
where her mechanical hum had silenced
(for a moment) twitters of birds, chirrups
of grasshoppers, the buzz of bumble-
bees tumbling from bramble flowers

and dog roses, their pollen faces.
On a July morning in ordinary paradise
rust begins to claim the motherboards.
Our next model, the ultimate creation,
will be an enticement by insects: her body
an unfolding of soft iridescence dusted
with pollen, DNA driven, alive.