Issue#2: Jan - Mar 2003

Twilight, the starlings


gather and become less
of each one. Like particulates


dissolving in solution,


they diminish into a difficult
pattern woven in flight.

Theirs is a form
of democracy denser
at the center while less

frantic at the hem
where the first to break

away is the first to be counted,

as when the configuration catches
against a steeple and rips


into nine birds on a cross--

four on each arm and one


on the tip of the head.
Everywhere their bodies


fall they fit, a quickness


for structure thickening
shingles and ledges like tiers,

inhabiting a temporary
hierarchy in the trees. It is a slow
transaction this billowing out

between stations. In flight
or as stones at the end

of a long trajectory, it seems

the birds arrive at a sum
only to count, cluster


by cluster, backwards

from it. In transition, what the starlings


fashion is an elastic
map out of air and space,


an elsewhere invisible


and abstract if not
for the hard coordinates

of their bodies-coins,
knots that loosen and fall
taut against the world's fixed symmetries.