ORDINARY BIRDS

Go early, our friends told us, just before sunrise, when the light above the mountains is a pink line that slowly turns yellow, then gold, and the sun sends up a long pale pillar. Then the geese will rise, calling, against the sky. You can hear the whisper of their wings.

We went to see the geese, early, Orion and the waning sickle moon still in the deep blue sky. We heard very far away, the geese muttering in a low wet place, waiting for dawn. The sky turned pink, and the sun sent up its shaft of light, and the gray clouds thickened and the light shut down. We stood in the shelter

against the south wind. The geese we came to see did not rise. Overhead in the rafters, little birds were waking: a grackle, house sparrows, one young brown cowbird. They shook themselves, preened their feathers, murmured their unthrilling music– ordinary birds, plain birds, in the gray morning, waking one by one.