Murmuration

I was in the car, just a kid, just in the backseat,

and could hear only the hum of the engine

and the hum of my parents talking–

but wasn’t childhood all a hum, and none of it concerning me?

Except that what I saw did concern me

and I, with that child’s instinct for secrets

kept it to myself–it, that had the same forbidden,

wandering-edged shape of the word “private,”

the shape of the feeling after first glimpsing a Playboy

in a cluster of boys, shoulder-to-shoulder, bodies crowding,

moving in a way much like starlings at dusk.

It would have been better if I had been standing still,

not curving off around a mountain, away, trailing off;

and it would have been better stood at the edge of a quiet field,

not in a droning car, where I could only imagine the sound–

and better if I had been older, less inclined toward secrets.

But what wouldn’t be improved by stillness, quietness,

forthrightness?

It would have been better to have turned to someone–

an old friend, or my father, who is getting older or, better,

someone who I couldn’t, without this moment, understand–

and say to them, “What is it called?”

that question that would never have occurred

to the me in the back of a car. Such things didn’t have names.

To hear a person say that word for the first time

in the presence of the thing it described–that giant black lung

hyperventilating in the sky, powered by a thousand birdbreaths–

the answer, how perfect, one of the few perfect words.

It happened like this instead: I was in the back of a car,

and the word I learned much later, in some unmemorable way.

And still there’s the possibility that I might be at the edge of a field,

conscious of my own dark lungs filling and falling

just as those starlings fill and fall, the rhythms of all breath,

and that someone–who hardly matters:

matters less than the fact that, whoever they are,

they are beyond any sacred silliness–

could still turn to me and say, “What is it called?”

and I’ll know, and say to them that perfect word

that describes the sound of a black cloud of starlings–

a thousand wings opening and closing, a thousand beaks–

and the sound of one divulging a long-kept secret.