repulsed by his strange, plump hands,

the sharp looks he still manages to draw

from his doctor wife. She can see that he is drunk,

like the smooth-cheeked lawyer beside him,

and that, careless with his looks, he is trying

to impress her, and he is—she reminds him

of a woman he once dated in college: the same

shrewd, unamused expressions

darkening her face. Which is why

he’d thought of the starlings at all

this evening, and why he has grown

somewhat morose now recalling them, the plans

he’d made to take his college girlfriend

on the birding tour for her birthday. Something

she on her own would never have done, calling it

frivolous, moved, if at all, by the sight, only

by what she would have called the birds’

fractal intelligence. She

a disciple of Pythagoras, as he used to tease her,

because she studied geometry, because she liked

to insist the world was one vicious being

devouring another, their own attraction determined

only by their proximity to each other, a connection

that felt safer to her than love, an idea

which strikes him now as a truthful

distillation of their relationship

that also demeaned it. Which is why

he is relieved it was his wife in the end

he took to watch the birds, their scattershot rise

from a stand of beech trees. How solid

they’d seemed, skimming the treetops

in long scarves, constellatory arms. They feel

their way into it, the guide had told them,

and his wife shivered against his shoulder.

So many dark wings beating the air. Uncountable,

though every year there were fewer. His girlfriend

never finished college because she died,

struck by a car on one of her runs. The birds

would have frightened her, he knew,

their sudden dips and changes, their great

chattering cries that became, over minutes,

unbearable. He’d had to cup his hands

over his ears to mute them. Did he ever see

them land? he wonders. They must have settled,

but had he seen them do it? He remembers

only that the skies had cleared a moment, the birds

thinning as they separated from one another.

How calm he’d felt, as his wife reached for his hand.

And then they were up again, and flowing, and flown.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paisley Rekdal is the author of three works of nonfiction and five previous books of poetry, including Animal Eye, which won the 2013 UNT Rilke Prize and was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Imaginary Vessels, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Tin House, and five editions of The Best American Poetry series, among other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow and NEA recipient, in 2017 she was elected Utah’s poet laureate.

Books

Also by Paisley Rekdal

Poetry

Imaginary Vessels

Animal Eye