Indigo Bunting just wrote about the annual migration of Canada Geese up in Vermont. It reminded me of Adam’s poem about our own seasonal migrations, though down here it’s the Sandhill Cranes instead of geese. It’s the poem I’m most likely to be found performing at poetry readings. I’m just crazy about it.
Once more they fly. The call comes to me in colors of the sky, in hues of the season so intimate and full of broad sound I expect their wings to tangle in my blowing hair as the seasons roll I look for them from the South in days of expanding light at the turn of the wheel I anticipate their flight from the North when the nights grow long I scan the skies. They are the wings of the unceasing circle; seasons follow them tethered in tow. They fly out of reach and fill the sky, obscure the clouds wingtip touching wingtip as comfortable lovers in the growing dusk, I can hear them long before they are in sight. A faint hint, a tufted whisper like a first bud on a winter tree a faint falling of a solitary yellow leaf. They come and go transient, like so much else here, visiting only briefly the Prairie sands before going on their way, becoming again the invisible landscape of my path through the years. Dynamic in space, fixed in time, I live here and await their passing as part of the order of the land, a living timetable, conductors of the year as much my life as the waning summer rains, the smoky scent of descending winter.
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