This miner's minion,

this drab rendition oflight

yellow, feathers faded, slated

saff ron—weatherbeaten

(as if there were weather here):

the canary, pitched

past pitch of countermelody,

chirrs its cagey call to the tune

of coal, the pickaxes

steeling themselves for the sharp,

the flat, the odd strike

of luck or a skittish match.

Tapping a channel with hammers,

the miners trail by threads

of song slanting through caverns,

shrill as a drillbit

scarping the rock to carbon.

But mountains shift their pilings, shafts

of rockdust hovering

in hacked-out pockets, in lungs,

between the feeble

warblings of a canary

harrowed to slag. When the air cracks,

the string snaps, the return

blurs—it's the foretold collapse,

core to conduits:

the blackdamp, the igneous

blast, the bird guttered from its perch,

the labyrinth tautly laced

onto a shuttle. Little

birds, broods bred for dank

and death, for lost myths—the maze

hot in the throat, the notes a pyre—

what beast of sacrifice

cannot guess its saving fire?