Visitors

They would come with the food of their freewheel flight
rampart-bound; lair built from on-the-sly-salvages.
Upon their winged arrival, wan little heads
would erupt with hectic peeps: nest-bound chicks.
They'd leave to take to air again, departure
a feathered snip so sharp the full eye of it
is mere periphery, crisper than the clean snap
the taut wrist makes of a kitchen tea towel-

but with finest feathers whose weight is light
is taut, whose tautness is light, like their flight
in the bug-buzzing air: the wide crescent swipes,
swung down so fast as harvest's sickle swing,
harvesting summer's smallest progeny.
As once I saw them through evening's plasma,
deep-pooled in air above the breathing meadow,
turning lunges, loops, electric up-thrusts

startled and not startled, dainty, and bracketing slight air
between their momentary bellies
and the shushing, slightly swaying hay grain hairs.
Bringing their two-pronged tails that fold on landing,
such utterly wild birds; such utterly
domestic birds, fusing chore and choreography,
that to have them abide above the front door
is like the fragment of wayside infinity

found in the coupling of green hedging set to be wrought
around wrought iron fence, like flame set inside
a lamp of solid glass and iron,
like water dripping on a plate of stone.