A pun opens the poem and sets its terms: "Today was no longer fall, but fly." Fall is the season, but it is also a verb of dropping, and the speaker swaps it for its opposite. The wind has turned a day of falling leaves into a day of things being flung upward. The f-sounds run on into "fast" and "traffic," so the line already seems to be hurrying. The word "traffic" brings in the poem's main comparison. Clouds do not usually move in lanes, but here they are a "fast / traffic," and from this point the sky is a road.
The poem is eleven lines long and breaks into two movements. In the first, the wind drops, and the speaker hears birds "making / strange noises in their sleep, / like fragments of car alarms." The simile is oddly precise. A car alarm is a human machine's cry of distress, and the poem hears it chopped into pieces, as if a sleeping flock were rehearsing a city's noises. Starlings are well known as mimics, so the comparison may be more than a whim, though the poem never says so. It only lets the sound be uncanny. Nature here is not a refuge from the built world. It has absorbed it and is muttering it back in its dreams.
The second movement is a memory, signalled by the plain "I remember." The poem's best image comes here: "the forest floor startling up / on iridescent wings." The floor itself seems to get up and fly. This makes sense if the birds were feeding on the ground and rose all at once, so that the ground appeared to lift. "Startling" does a lot of work as a verb, since it carries the flock's sudden panic and the watcher's surprise together. "Iridescent" is the one glittering word in the poem, and it gives the birds their individual shimmer. Then the camera pulls back. The flock becomes "a rush / hour crowd" and finally "the dark road / they unfurled across the sky." Up close the birds are bright. From a distance they are one dark ribbon. The poem holds both views, and the shift in colour shows how a crowd of individuals turns into a single moving shape.
The line breaks add to the effect. "Rush" is left at the end of one line and "hour" waits on the next, so the phrase has to hurry over the gap. "A fast" and "Now that" also break off before their nouns and clauses arrive, which keeps the reader leaning forward. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm follows speech, with short phrases piled up and then released. The ampersands ("& a fast," "& I remember," "& the dark road") suggest a quick, shorthand jotting, a mind catching an impression before it fades. That fits a poem about something glimpsed and gone.
The verbs trace a change of pace as well. The day "was," the birds "are making," and the speaker "remember[s]." Wind and motion belong to the past tense of the day, and the quiet of the present brings the memory back. Stillness, the poem implies, is when the movement can be seen clearly. Only once the wind has dropped does the speaker see the flock again.
The poem is significant because it avoids the easy choice between loving nature and distrusting modern life. The traffic comparison could have been a complaint, with wild birds reduced to commuters. Instead it works both ways. The road in the sky makes the starlings familiar, and the starlings make the road beautiful. The last word, "sky," gives the road room to open out, and "unfurled" suggests a flag or ribbon unrolling rather than a jam. In eleven lines the poem shows that we see wildness through the things we know, and that this can make it stranger and more vivid instead of smaller.