Over the Hills

Dear Todd,

I was taking the broom for a slow shuffle around the dining room when I heard the fluting of wild swans & rushed out, scanning the sky till I spotted the long wedge high above the hollow, heading north. They were as dark against the sky as we must be to them against the ground, pausing in our Sunday labors, mouths open as the swans pass over the train tracks & the river, over the interstate & the quarry’s enormous silent megaphone, over a cardinal singing in a barberry hedge, over junker cars & houses sheathed in fading asphalt shingles, over old carpets left out in the yard to kill the grass where a vegetable garden will go, over the burrows of amorous woodchucks and the leaf nests of squirrels, over sheets & long johns flapping on the line. The swans seemed tireless. Their one refrain might as well have been “Over the Hills & Far Away,” as in the Burl Ives song about the piper’s son. They’d keep it up long past the last tree, I knew — until the land cleared of almost all clutter, there where the darkness disappears for months. I went back to my sweeping, assembled the dust from every corner, then opened the door & ushered that small blue hill into the wind.