Birds in search of a poem

 

  

When the galaxy of South American swallows

returns to fill the Anchorage evening sky

with their swift black constellations,

this is not the poem.

But have you seen them!

I mean the million birds expanding and contracting

for real, on the edge of chaos,

right up there above you,

neck-bending, head-looking-up real

and then also in the sky of the mind --

the mind that knows only the small facts of migration,

where they are from, where they are going.

The mind that is reduced to the mud-star wonder of it.

It!  This hundred thousand million birds

shooting and swirling and darting

above the giant grade school chimney

awaiting the soft signal of dusk to descend into it

like a million black sky rabbits disappearing

back into the magician’s large stone hat.

This is not the poem.

But when the last five become the last one.

When the inscrutable instruction

swallows the last Swallow into the giant mouth.

When the great stone chimney

is silent and still.

This is the poem.