whirled to the north
And came down
Like a comet’s tail,
Then like a cloud of frost,
Slowly lofting,
A fuzzy galactic avatar.
Then we could tell it was birds,
Wings set, hovering
And flipping like pages
Of news in wind.
Then it was
White pelicans
With nine-foot wingspans,
And we saw the black-tipped
Remiges
Of the largest of boreal birds
Coming to rest
On our modest lake
In their ordained sortie
From Florida, the Gulf Coast,
And Panama,
To their home in British Columbia.
It was a pod,
Then a squadron,
Then a scoop,
As their wings became parachutes,
And they water-skied in.
There must have been a thousand of them,
Veering and banking
To avoid collisions.
Some luffed,
Waiting their turn.
It took an hour
For them all to come down
And fold their wings
And huddle in the middle
Like a melting ice floe.
They bore spikes for beaks,
And their necks hooked
Like shepherds’ crooks.
And then I thought
Of the blind man
I’d seen in the market
In a small village
In Italy,
Where this sort of thing can occur,
His open palm of bills,
All folded and tucked
Like origami,
Creased in different shapes
(Someone must have done this
For him),
Triangles, rectangles, squares,
So he could tell their
Denominations.
A door opened,
And a wind scattered his currency.
All the people knelt
To gather his geometries
And return them
To his hand.
Snow
It was snowing nurses.
The blond ones
From ICU.
They wore those perky
Little nurse hats,
White coats.
They wore surgical
Masks and carried
IV needles
And bags of morphine.
They had sponges
In their pockets.
They landed gently
On the lawn,
And looked around,
Not knowing
What to do.
It was snowing
Polar bears,
Who loved us for
Our temporary mercy.
They landed gently
On the lawn,
On all fours,
But then stood
On their hind legs
And sniffed all around,
Confused.
It was snowing sawdust
From the Amish coffin shop.
It was snowing shuttlecocks
That looked like pastries
Or tiny volcanoes.
At least they looked at home
Lying on the grass.
It was snowing pastries.
It was snowing swaddled babies.
They landed gently.
It was snowing wan
Corpses in dress whites
That had started out
As babies with zero
Knowledge of pastries,
Or shuttlecocks,
Or sawdust,
Or polar bears,
And
