Numberless, beaks pointed the same way like seagulls
on pilings in the wind, they burst the field's seams
like Easter Christians at St. Peter's. Eastern Birds
says that Canada geese should be in Mexico in January,
with their unsmiling eyes couched in black masks
relieved by white chinstraps. That guide needs rewriting
along with its fellows: The northern limit of olive shells
isn't South Carolina anymore; possums and cardinals
aren't southern beasts. Standing so still in open spaces
almost endlessly, their diet must be herbage.

On occasion, when no-one's looking, they do flap up.
Not like seagulls, shrieking and milling and cursing
the front-end loaders down below, burying the garbage,
phalanxes and stragglers ka-ronk, ka-lunk along,
sometimes settling on unfrozen lakes, or, if frozen,
on the running water they empty into, or, if frozen,
on brackish tidal flows and saltmarshes, or, if frozen,
onto the ocean. True to themselves, they aim posteriors high.
They and mute swans -- whose wingtips sing though -- are of a feather.
Sometimes too, they are just switching greenery,
in quest of a golf course, a park, an industrial lawn where,
gourmand grass-eaters, the blades are longer.

An unthinking glance at these wedges traversing the sky
like vapor trails, even when they are bound north in winter,
brings balminess to mind, daisy chains of butterflies
strung from almost verdant trees and bushes that grow on
cliffs overlooking azure seas where parrotfish
float in warmth, pecking lazily at bedizened coral reefs.