
Listen, and you’ll hear the tick of the poem’s
stuttering heart; its breathless gush. But
notice how it becomes sullen now, dragging
its feet; refusing to play, until something
catches its eye — a swift, perhaps, dividing
the sky, its belly and beak skimming the
surface of a river. It longs to tell you how
swifts can live as long as twenty years; how
we find it impossible to tell the sexes apart,
and (as you knew) how it sleeps on the wing.
How quickly the poem forgets itself, because
now it has become the swift itself, piecing
together its nest of words, glued with saliva,
travelling a world without touching the ground.