'65 Red Dale

IN THE PRESENCE OF BIRDS

The night was a cold crypt, and I feared nightmares. 

I awoke from a deep torpor in a tin can travel trailer
by the lake.  After boiling water for coffee I went
outside to sit under a drooping blackjack oak, still

clinging to a suite of honeyed leaves.  It was then I
heard the dulcet ecstasy of migratory birds returning
for the spring, the final leg of a three thousand mile
journey.  I sat there until time became a meandering

river.  And then a pair of mourning doves on the picnic

table crept closer, thinking I was a lifeless tree stump.  
When you metamorphose into a tree stump in the
presence of birds your troubles tend to float skyward. 

They drift with the winds and then fasten to the

wings of birds to be carried away and released along
ancient migratory routes that will guide their vagabond
spirits long after we are gone.