Seasons turn the birds
like pages.
V's in the slipstream,
deny this place as habitat,
when Canadian airs
slump down in the jetstream.
Pelican pouches gone,
black tipped twirling
thermal phrases gone.
Stilt legged herons,
still and balanced on a single bone,
like prophesy, a blue note
scribbled in the margins.
Egrets, orange-beaked
and wading,
slow stepped
and stabbing,
reading slow
the ditch water
for movement,
paddling boats
of the many ducks,
wood, ruddy, mallard and wigeon,
gliding bloom algae scratchings
of summer, gone.
All the fattening
cushlings gone.
Even the Kingbird,
stout-shouldered,
Maltese,
relinquishes its kingdom,
surveyed from the fastening post,
The cunning moves Othello,
on these crisping griddled plains.
Dark-eyed Junco,
black over white,
return the wintering hedge,
to the shrivelled berries,
road grit, given seed
and stubbled white pages.
Great grays and redtails
lurk these simpler plumes
in simpler plumes,
and wait the white plunging.