Coming Home

We drive through a murmuration of starlings. There’s nothing to do, everything just happens all directions at once. It’s strange, because they’re doing it down here on earth. They sweep from the school athletics field, across the small road we’re on, into a large yard with a mansion. They fly right into the middle of our conversation, the middle of the radio, the dire world. They’re only a handful of feet above the earth. They pare around us as though they were a sculptor carving an imaginary apple. They prove how insubstantial we are, that they can just pour around us like water as we destroy the sky going somewhere. A school teacher stands before a classroom growing older and the same thing happens to her, year after year. A flock aims at her, separates cordially around her body, and is gone forever. You want to place a note on the sky: Don’t try to explain this to others. Keep it.