Not Swans

I drive toward distant clouds and my mother’s dying.

The quickened sky is mercury, it slithers

across the horizon.  Against that liquid silence,

a V of birds crosses—sudden and silver.

They tilt, becoming white light as they turn, glitter

like shooting stars arcing slow motion out of the abyss,

not falling.

              Now they look like chips of flint,

the arrow broken.

               I think, This isn’t myth—

they are not signs, not souls.

                               Reaching blue

again, they’re ordinary ducks or maybe

Canada geese.  Veering away they shoot

into the west, too far for my eyes, aching

as they do.

             Never mind what I said

before.  Those birds took my breath.  I knew what it meant.

Published in Sweet Confluence, New and Selected Poems