Tree Heart
by Raphael Dagold

In a tree, blackbirds -- a swarm, an open hive,
each black lightness its own small chamber:
The birds are not crows and are not death

and there are hundreds of them in the dryness,
quick late-summer breathing back at the leaves
they're hungry doubles of, wet shades of oxygen

gathering, a gather and a making of a flock
from a tree, a leaf a wing, two a bird, three a bird
with a beak and a flutter and a lack

of patience, sun up and a hot sheen
already, air heated and moving in quick drifts
shaking the leaves, the leaves are strange here,

so many of them shaking but still silent,
their sound is under the sound of the birds
loud in the light, light shooting clean

from one hillside through to the next, pale,
before it's gone and saturated everything,
light strung to a key the birds play, each of the hundred,

the birds are so loud it's easy to think this,
that the very light is sound:
Then one of them goes. No mission. No scout.

Just go, come back, like that, some more go
to land in the field below the tips of grain
so a haze begins, elastic, a stream of one body

from the tree like a cell's separation,
no flat, no hollow, no more,
you'd think, could fit where they all go

to eat, is all, all the flock's pieces
beating their wings for the ground.
It is almost. It is almost too much

for the field to carry where they've described
themselves, written their own low arcs,
rippling and settling for each new two or three

until the tree of birds is in the field. Murmuring.
The light is there. The light is a disappearance.
And they are eating. And they are making room.