Diminuendo
Starlings, as before,
whistle wondering at themselves,
crescendo, diminuendo.
My heart pounds away
confident as a clock.
Yet there is silence.
Living Alone (II)
Denise Levertov
It’s a new word to me--diminuendo--though I know
I’ve heard it before, somewhere far from here
but I can’t say exactly where or maybe I have
never heard it only ever seen it and didn’t
know there was a name for what I was seeing.
Take murmuration: I admire the work of that word and
seeing that word work, how all the birds
show us what the air really looks like, how turning
the way they do at the glint on a pupil or beak
is really possible, and too how all the rest pick up
interpret the cue instantly and fly and dip and recover
and then all at once it’s over and they’ve found
some spot to land to huff out their lungs and ruffle
their exhaustion. They’ve found the salt marsh
somewhere or the edge of their sea and come
to be little individuals sifting for sand fleas, they’ve
found their diminuendo, the speckled quartz of it,
the edge of a footprint of it, how at the heavy stepped
edge the sand is still falling into the heel print of it
covering what boot brand they don’t need to care
about they can just prance past it coming down from all
that fantastic air in pairs in threes and if I wait if I don’t
move something will start one farther off and she’ll
rise first and then those twos and threes and then the whole
flock and the sky is pocked with them and the air, the air
is clothed, is exposed.
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