One at each of the four corners of my yard--
a pine tree, a willow bough, a fencepost, a sunflower drooping with its first touch of wintertime
they make a sound impossible to replicate, something between a chirp and a caw, something between vowels and consonants, something utterly strange and utterly foreign.
On some impossible signal, they rise
and launch themselves into the wind-currents.
Below, we sit and stew
in our knowledge of the long, implacable wintertime to come.
But you break the clouds, feel the sun, unadulterated
by the whims of snow and rain.
You need never bat a wing.

The birds are so small. From this distance, without glasses, they almost cease to exist. They are vestiges of linear perspective, nothing more-- some god's experiment with notions of the zero.
Yet they flirt with death so easily.