The Starlings

Feeble, sickly

 late November sun glazes

 midwestern bone bareness

 severe skeletons of oak

 the world cracked shut

 opaque skies, broken eggshells

 frail light absorbed by black tar   of asphalt

 as I tread, swish of snowpants

 inflated coat, aunt-knitted purple mittens

 static hair, matted at the neckline

 my body, sexless and middle aged

 crowned by a neon orange beanie that peaks like a condom

 like a rooster’s wattle, vain and flapping

 but necessary, given the scattered pops of gunshots

 along the colorless tree line

 crackling like fresh wood thrown in a fireplace

 passing a sallow field

 punctured by the bounding buck—

 startled frantic and thick-thighed

 I count the plastic bags

 garbage scattering the roadside

 miniature hard liquor bottles   shredded soda cans

 caught in wire fence lines  rusted and sagging

 pavement smeared with roadkill:

 pieces of a neighbor’s cat  fluff and dried chunks of blood

 the gaping scream of a decapitated opossum

 a half-devoured mouse

 swirls of summer snakes pummeled flat

 and dodge the belligerent pickup trucks   which rev their engines  ascending the icy hill.    Like the landscape, I am:  grey and ruthless  flat, forsaken

despairing as dirt before the soft surrender of snowfall a corpse drained of spirit.

Then cresting a hill

the sky opens abruptly:

a raw flush of them, full-flocked                      thousands shroud a clump of elms dense and ripe with blackness

               chittering humidly like stumbling upon a jungle

               wheezing, sputtering in garrulous gangs

avian invaders from across the seas

               crowds calling to each other, egging themselves on

taking off and landing in swollen bursts, cresting waves

               restlessly convening and reconvening on branches

limb to limb, sputtering with a wet terror

               like preparing for the flood, ready to embark

each one: a droplet of the swarm

               an atom of God

surging upward into their vortex

               they moisten me, unhinging something

flipping me inside out

               loosening spirit from a stiff winter jail

tearing open the brittleness

              liberating mind from its cold wire cage.

We are on the verge of something

             I don’t know what

wild and dripping

             with epiphany.