Feathered things

This fellow continues to please me. 

He visits daily for a cracked-corn snack, 

with a couple of his brothers and sisters

and stands out among the more-plentiful mallards.

Swifts

Early fall, the light thin and brittle, and if

it's true that deprivation is a gift,

I accept the gift. I walk down

to Wallace Park to watch the swifts

that roost every September

in the Chapman School's tall

brick chimney. The charming swifts

with their long forked tails

and swept-back wings,

ten thousand of them swerving

and darting in the evening sky,

a flowing, expandable spiral

of birds, clearing the air of insects

and riveting the wandering

human mind. Tonight there mist be

three hundred spectators,

a whole hillside of us, ordinary people

whose wings fell off long ago,

who traded flight for speech

and have regretted it ever since,

sodden and earthbound as we are,

except for our lifted eyes, our oohs and aahs

that show we're still alive when

the peregrine falcon dives in 

and knifes one out of the ait,

which we boo or cheer,

sometimes simultaneously.

We love this passion play of form

and formlessness,

the birds' shifting patterns

flung out like a whiplash of water

or school of fish above

the stationary human school,

then drawn tight together,

a miracle they don't crash into each other,

a miracle of echolocation, until

you see them as they truly are:

a single organism, a body made mostly

of air and quick decisions, jagged

motions that gradually cohere---

a poem, in other words.

It takes the flock a full twenty minutes

to funnel down the chimney,

and it seems a living smoke

pulled back into a still and sleeping fire,

so beautiful I forget for a moment

my father's death, or I turn my mind 

away from it or no, I open

my grief to accommodate this wonder

and wonder what he might have thought of it,

were we standing here together,

the kind of thing we never did, and now

will never do, except in my imagination---

that unchanging inner sky where the swifts

take flight whenever I want them to

and my father cannot die.

John Brehm

The Gettysburg Review, Winter 2013, pages 627-628.

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