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.
Lizzy Beck lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Salamander Magazine, Pleiades, RHINO, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Find her online at lizzybeck.com.
04/10 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Chloe Martinez and local poet Ximena Gómez / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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So beautiful.
So gorgeous.