It is good that the universe should have no edge but rather spreads in all directions endlessly, if only that we need the space in order to contain the untold numbers of imaginations captured through the ages by migration.
Such a fine trick, like a ship in a bottle;
so grand a story in so small a bird
One last stroke of her wings and
this golden-winged warbler—the weight
of three pennies, a single 500 colones coin—
descends through the canopy
to perch in dappled rainforest light, her
yellow epaulettes aglow
She neither counts nor contemplates the
miles she’s made, the crossings of borders,
continents and lines of latitude in
passage from the St. Croix Valley—
where her ground nest now
lies buried under fallen leaves and early snow—
to these mountain slopes of Costa Rica’s
Peninsula de Osa
Instead, she takes a breath of
humid air and for the briefest moment rests,
her heartbeat slightly slowing in its
cage of hollow bones
Around her, the rustle of gleaning and preening,
the feather-rush of fellow journey birds, each
finding their time-tailored niche among those who remain—
this incoming tide of waxwings and whip-poor-wills,
northern orioles and scarlet tanagers,
Swainsons’ and wood thrush,
mixed flocks of warblers
all swept into Corcovado’s embrace
to pass the months from wet season to dry
in company of bellbirds and bananaquits,
scale-crested pygmy tyrants and great curassows,
blue-crowned motmots and mottled owls;
here, where still the howler monkeys howl and
soft night-feet of jaguars stalk their prey
beneath the spangled sweep of Magellanic clouds
Pura vida! She reverberates
like the tremors of the
descending Cocos,
moving by flit and gambol,
eluding vipers in the tubú as she
forages for insects, her ancestors
made present in her reach of slender
beak into the hanging curls
of dead leaves, in her sudden yawn
exposing a secreted katydid or would-be moth—
her inheritance, this choreography
of relationship with place,
a fittedness, a muscled grace,
her life caught in the balance of
refining for the proffered world
And when the time is here
there are no words
The sun, it speaks to her
in spring with longer days, with light
that whispers through the paper-thin
skin of her skull; her answer in the
cavalcade of hormones calibrated
by her twists of DNA, an urgency
to lay down stores of fat, a ramping
restlessness, until one night
a certain wind
compels her finally to go,
her wings among the multitudes
to flicker on the moon
She orients to north across the Gulf,
checking her course against
legions of stars, magnetic fields,
the locus of her place-time moving steady
through the trades, the calms, the westerlies;
defining and belonging to
this space above the earth,
her far-flung wintering and breeding grounds,
the stepping-stones of necessary landfall in
between all one continuum of home
Somewhere ahead, the voices
tune again to morning, males returning
to the river valley days and weeks before
to find familiar perches or to circle empty air
where once they were, like moths
drawn to remembered lights
A single golden-winged reclaims his
grassy clearing at the forest edge,
uncommon opening among the oaks and pine,
the scattered saplings leaning into sun with
scrubby thickets of pin cherry, chokecherry
blackberry already greening with new leaves;
assembled fragments of a dream
he somehow recognizes as his own, knowing
without knowing there to take his place and
sing into the sky, waiting without
waiting for her to come.
