Estuary

How it must have been for them, when wind came to strike cottonwoods they called home down —silver bridges across a gun-smoke creek-bed, joining yellow meadow to meadow...how it must have been like the beginning of time, when the first one beat great wings (though so silent a field mouse would never even hear before talons sinking in...) and rose over the Blues to find this valley with others following. And their human eyes, forward-gazing in their round faces, they turned toward sound to catch it in feather discs, their hearing tuned beyond human imagining...and then they were gone, like mist dissipating in the lowlands, and an eye trained toward their going might, squinting, distinguish signs of intention written by pinions, stroking damp air in their westward rowing. And we told ourselves all water eventually finds the sea—our coming, their going—so synchronous; this was simply something we wanted, more than knowing, wholly to believe.