A butterfly flaps aimlessly
across a field in China
and a dust storm gathers
over the Great Plains.
 
It’s not what anyone would call 
music, the cries of crows and gulls, 
frantic and random,
over the beach at sunrise 
and I’m no translator but
there might be a language,
syntax of wings, black and white,
pulling the littoral into words
about what lies on and under
rocks and waves, 
a cloud of confabulation
that for all I know 
speaks of things succulent and salty
while in a distant sanctuary organ music
rises in response to these hymns,
these hungry cries.
                        

not just any but the one
delivering an inch of rain
on a farm in Kansas – who
will say that storm doesn’t
take direction from the weathercock
swinging on the barn ridge, 
flashing when it turns
in the wind? All this chaos, 
atmospheric disturbance hidden
where we create the predictable,
pattern of streets laid out in 
spokes and grids, easy navigation 
for emergency vehicles,
and in the recipe for biscuits
that never flake, the routine 
that brings me home in time
for the six o’clock news – 
chaos embedded in the ordinary,
behind the squirrel that just
slipped from branch to branch 
and did not fall as the wind subsided.
And while I’m not looking it could
sneak by in the shadow of my wife who 
opens a shoebox of old photos, 
and laughs, remembering 
trick-or-treaters at the door, 
twenty Halloweens ago. This
murmuration, confusion of storms
and of these odds and ends,
like Facebook notifications
popping up on the screen – starlings
that somehow stick together
in one swirling cloud.