Who believes in them?
It doesn’t matter much
to the souls, newly set free,
wheeling in the air over the site
of their last engagements.
Suppose we could see them?
They’d be like sparrows—no like,
they’d be birds, one of those autumn flocks
when the solitaries gather in great numbers
over the waste places and the remaining fields,
turning in the air as if together they made a huge piece of cloth
folding in on itself, or a mathematical diagram of folding…
No hurry, nothing obscuring the air for them—
vast sky, entirely light-washed,
as they assemble into a great progression of pattern.
In community at last, we want to proceed in our flock, our troop…
Incorporated into a radiant vitality without ceasing…
You want more than that?
Of course you do: you want the steady
mosquito-drone to go on and on, ceaselessly,
you want to be the one who gets to do the perceiving
forever, of course you do.
But here’s my guess:
it’s another thing for the dead;
they’ve been singular long enough.
We can’t let ourselves see what
enormous work it is
to be one of something, to exert
the will to sustain those boundaries.
The dead, rimless,
loosed from particularity,
move out toward the edge of the city,
someplace the flock can unknot itself
freely, where they can feast in the fields
oblivious to the column of smoke roiling behind them.
Anniversary day, evil wind banging the door to the gym
till the glass shattered, and Mauricio said,
—in a low voice, as if to say it would somehow protect him—
Lot of spirits blowing around today