Starlings, Late November

They come up off the water like a thought
you almost had. Ten thousand, and no leader,
no plan surviving contact with the air—
only the rule that each attends to seven,

seven neighbors, nothing more, and from
that poverty of attention: architecture.
The column. The hourglass. The great
inhalation and the black bloom after.

I have watched an hour and understood nothing
and been more instructed than by books.
There is no starling in that field who knows
the shape it makes. Not one. The shape is real.

My father died in November. I mention this
not because the birds have anything to say
about it—they do not, they are only hungry
and afraid, and beauty is their accident—

but because I stood in a similar cold
and watched a similar unbearable precision
assemble out of separate small intentions:
the nurses, the neighbors, the casseroles, the cards.

No one directing. Everyone attending
to their seven. And a shape came up
that none of us designed and all of us
were inside of, and it held, and it was terrible,

and it was, I think, the closest thing
to a cathedral I have stood beneath.
Then the birds go down into the reeds at once,
the way a hand closes. The sky is only sky.

The evening resumes its ordinary business.
I put my hands back in my coat. I walk.
Behind me in the dark ten thousand hearts
are beating out of time and keeping time.