Golden Shovel with the Last Slash Pines (Song of Songs 2:3)

The swifts speak to the sky like
spies tapping out practice code, pushing the
air away so the sun might paint their pale forms quince
and rose. They follow constellations of insects threaded among
the slash pines and the early clouds, intricate and holy as the
weavings of some celestial spider. These trees

are tall enough to suggest their own kind of 
weather. Maybe if I climbed into the
shy crowns that persist in this dismembered forest,
I’d learn to ignore gravity’s warnings and so
could focus not on the fear of falling but on the desire that is
flight, and finally join the susurrous wings of my

flock. They used to land by the millions in this beloved
canopy, their thunder pitched high as an angels’ orchestra among
the scattered performances of the firmament, back when the
talent shows in heaven were accompanied by loud young
creatures singing in all the evergreens, millennia before men
and their metal appeared. Now the chaos lives beneath

these branches. Local chickens follow the sun’s command, its
precise sequence of quarter-light/half-light/lost shade.
God knows climbing trees is not an activity I
would attempt except under duress, but I have sat 
in wonder on a forest floor and hiked in
elevations that would baffle even these trees. Delight

still knows to show up here, even as its
shadows shrink. In March the mangoes reveal fruit
in its earliest form, tiny as a squirrel’s fist, if that fist was 
desperately holding an animal belief in sweetness, 
which might be a squirrel’s only faith, or as close to 
faith as it gets. The squirrels on my
block navigate the branches all day, searching for a taste.

Read more from Issue 23.1.