I waddle among pelicans of grief.They waddle through me,our throat sacs stapled shut.I stir the third soup, lovage and thirteen bean,then bend over wild mushroom brothto inhale fern and moss.The beetroot soup, soured with tonicteased from the skin of wheat,stings blood red—a compromisefor a night without drinks.This winter I’m learning how not to die:With a new emergency generator unboxed,the book on the rhetoric of science off to press.Or bleeding from the esophagus in the wake of your wife’sdeath to cancer while still mourning the murdered daughter.Overtranquilized for having raised hell when hours passbefore an aide cleans your bedmate’s feces. You lift a wide-tipped marker to your faceand, without mirror, thicken brows and limn, askew on your cheek, a hooked beak.An ocean away from me, you are pecking at your breast, dying.This winter I learn how not to die by making soup—beetroot, mushroom, bean—and pound the waters with wings and feet to steal enough speed.