For the birds

I.
Against the clear and shifting pearl-pink of dawn and dusk skies, the birds have been dancing. Great flocks of them, turning and throbbing overhead. They stretch and twist into ribbons or mass together into dense amoebas, all distinct curve with no constant form. Now they are so close they are a single black body; now they spread themselves thin and let the light through. Always they keep to form. I could trace their outline with a sharp pencil, if they stayed still long enough for my hand to reach out. But they are pulsing through the air, all motion and change, and my fingers cannot catch them.

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II.
In the northeast part of my city, where the mountains grow so big they begin to seem real and the western horizon opens so far to reveal what lies beyond the mesa, there is an intersection. It is very usual, and very ugly. Two huge roads meet, twenty lanes of asphalt weaving together in a hard, black latticework. It is loud. Signs bellow their advertisements between arcs of wind-borne trash.

It is not what I would call a special place.

And yet: each time I pass it, I can’t help but think of a summer day three years ago and more, when I sat at this stoplight and a specific joy found me. Among the plastic bags and dead tumbleweeds milling about in the shin-high weeds, something small and soft must have trembled and tried to blend with dust and thorn and rock. Above, a kestrel hung in the air as if from a string. An oversized, underspeed hummingbird mimic, it swooped its powerful wings once, twice, six times in succession, and remained suspended over its prey.

I’d never seen a bird of its size do that. It was impossible and mesmerizing and amusing to learn something so new and so beautiful, in such a spot.

Seeing its moment, the raptor closed its wings around its body and fell, tilting into an arrow-true dive to the ground. When I saw it again, it moved with such purpose away from the killing ground that I didn’t need to see its mouth to know it full.

It was a small kernel against the clouds when the light turned green.
The car horns had never stopped blaring.