1.
They know to trust the compass
of their bodies, the pull toward
far distance, change of light,
of season, earlier generations’
memory of perpetuity, of eggs.
2.
They know how the threats come,
how high to lift above the biting teeth,
the claws, the seeming-sleeping cat
in the golden corner of the yard.
3.
They know to trust their wings, updraft
of air, right conditions for flight, what
they make and cannot make of a wind.
4.
They know to trust their calls,
their alarms, alarms of other birds.
5.
Their bright eyes, set as prey.
6.
What can we do but feel
in our bodies what we feel,
to fly when moved to flight.
7.
Lengthening days, shortening days,
miscalculation in the body’s math.
8.
The marsh is dry, plants changing,
what was a forest is an expanse
of clipped green. Still, pockets.
Reservoir, stream, trees. They know
how very tired a body can be,
forced to go on, go on longer
because there is no place to land.
9.
Sometimes what seems like open
sky is a barrier, something hard that
dazes, cracks, that breaks the neck.
10.
The moon, the moon.
11.
A nest is a home shaped to a body.
The shape of hope is an egg.
Everything is fragile.
We don’t even feel it when it starts.
The eggshell, the nest, the wind.
Keeled scales scrape across bark.
12.
I want to say that even as the seasons
lengthen, shorten, south is always south,
but what can any of us say we know?
All these sensing bodies, what we feel
that moves us from one place to another.
13.
I know deep within my body
I am building something
that pulls toward you,
that we would fly the length
of continents to find, to find
each other, to pull what
we can from the landscape
to make a space that each
of us will fill, knowing it
could be blasted by a gust,
knocked apart early—how
could we protect it?—but
again, again, we’ll find each
other, the devastating wind.
—
Jennifer Browne’s interests are accumulative. She is the author of American Crow (Beltway Editions, 2024), and the poetry chapbooks whisper song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Her work has recently appeared in Poets for Science, Humana Obscura, Trailer Park Quarterly, and One Sentence Poems.
