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.