You can’t hear them and feel sad, my friend said of the cranes,
the sandhills in great number on the Platte River. Try me,
I said. On the plane, my hands sweat as the pilot tries
to land us in the wind. Just as some bodies, I understand, do not become
airsick, so too, I understand, is it possible to see a sky full
of birds and not think military exercises, not think omen or plague
of locusts. Hitchcock. Alien invasion. Somewhere, someone exists
for whom it is no effort to imagine that something good
might swarm. All year on the Platte, the scientists
hustle towards a welcome: the herd of bison tagged, the banks
scoured of trees, tractor and fire and sprayer. Look how nearly
I said prayer, so incongruous it is, this blend of love and mostly
work. The collective noun for giraffes in motion is different
from giraffes at rest, and when the cranes fly in (like wildfire,
like drifting smoke) I can’t imagine why a group of them is called
a sedge. Then night comes: they drop into the river
and thicken. My friend isn’t entirely wrong, the way in the morning
the cranes rise from the river to dance, hop,
throw sticks, how they land like parachutists,
their great wings ballooning, and their gladdening,
enveloping sound. I could see the world this way:
the wetlands with their rushes dense as cranes. The air-dropped rations
descending to the street like cranes. Mosquitoes land on the body to drink
the way a crane scoops river water. How my son’s heart on the monitor
beat like fifteen-thousand cranes. Like a crane, like a crane, like
a crane. Because my friend isn’t wrong, not entirely. I almost
don’t feel sad. Not until the darkness comes, and then finally
it isn’t because they are leaving, the ones I love, but because I am.
