In droves and skeins and sords and doles,
gleans, lofts, coffles, fevers, mysteries,
shoals, by murders, bevies, drifts, mischiefs,
as clews, as swarms, like living chainmail
spread across the scene. The many
separate but uniform configure one
flexible screen to which each body fastens
by the rivet of its eye, by the rivet of its melting
mind forged and recast by instinct. Separate
uniform animals or one animal many times
reflected. Whatever they’re made of canceling
whatever the ground is made of, silver or feathers
or fins revising the surface under them till it is
nothing or nothing familiar, face of
the gravel, the river, air stuttered
through chinks in the swarm is
refracted, resolved or nearly
remembered foliage
recovered to the blasted tree
by the flocked rooks settling.
