those that have just broken a flower vase

Because some birds land only to nest,
because they travel through the canyon’s
half-light like science fiction standards,
the swerve and veer through a dangerous chute,
because down valley the landscape fades
to a geometric test of wills—algebraic
agriculture arguing with the river’s
floodplain calculus—because the clouds
branch and froth in blossom above
the Allegheny Mountains, because
these peaks have been lifted up
and torn down three times, because
exhaustion writes its name in deer trails
across the smoky hillsides in midwinter,
because beauty walks hand in hand
with grief, because it’s the only time
she’ll ever see one, I’ll talk about
the collared swift that died in flight
(family name Apodidae—without feet)
and landed in my neighbor’s pachysandra.
The picture window rang where
it smacked the glass. Framed in the casement,
her husband drops to his knees in the March-wet
earth, a stroke blooming up the branches
in his head. At least that is how I choose
to imagine it—the gelling of the narrative
around the low tone of rung glass,
the warm carcass of the bird splayed
in the elegant green of the new shoots,
his dead-arm slump as the cat, startled, drops
from the pie chest and knocks a bud vase
from its place. So, as she turns to find
the door, she sees them both there
suspended in mid-air, with the grace
of everything about to shatter.

Jeffrey Thomson