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This Time Last Year

By Pamela Sumners

This time last year a neighbor who always lingers
to talk asked me if we'd noticed the silence of the
chimney swifts and the nighthawks lately. I had not.
This year, with no hum of traffic, with just the shrieks
of little girls in their speckled-egg Easter leggings
tramping the fenced back yard, I do breathe in the full
orchestral range of the birds: the grackles with their
puffed-out pipe whistle plunging so rapidly deep
into a guttural caw, the chimney swifts' high-toned
chattering, able to call out while still on the wing,
foraging my deck for seeds, battling each other but
sharing with the sparrows. Their claws unfit for perching,
swifts lurch straightaway and bathe by doing a water glide
in flight, their pond in this case a blue plastic wading pool
we keep for the dogs. The swifts cling to the mortar joists
to roost overnight or for nesting, remembering the caves,
the sheer, creviced rock faces jutting over rivers,
the hollowed-out trees where their ancestors foraged. This
is a neighborhood of old trees, of houses with chimneys,
of Olmsted parks and meet-me-in-St. Louis wrought-iron
pickets, a perfect place for the little smudge-gray flyer,
with its cigar-shaped silhouette in flight and its fluid
sweep. They greet the surging dawn like fish singing
into the reef. Sometimes they've been seen in small flocks
funneling themselves into the flues like infinitesimal
tornados. They memory-hoard the dark, the cavernous
seclusion of primordial home, love their splendid isolation
in a way that the tenders of lawns, peddlers of provender,
the neighbor instinctually leaning over the fence to you, cannot.

They do not know that the chimney owners are living through
a goddamn featherstroke of history, now nesting with them, awake.