Unlikely Sway

If you don’t know about the bones, if you forget about how they can be flutes and rainspouts, how they are brittle flint and how they only matter when we try to understand the majesty, the wonder of it, if you can see only the size, only the shape, the unlikely sway, the darker gray against the cloud’s dark gray, the bird at the tip of the tree seems an impossible thing like a house on a ball, like a tidal wave in a teacup, and if you think for too long about the faded shape, large and watchful, the crow alone at the top of the thin branches— winter making naked even the tree’s eyelashes— the whole idea of how we live on this Earth starts to unknot. The whole idea that the world is right side up is vexed.

Why should we be stuck down here with the blacktops and beer cans? Why go to work? Church? Why say sorry? Either the bird needs to explain itself, or we do.

- Brian Lutz