Through the window
on the branch
against the evening winter sky
a blue bird
rests on the branch
and a natural shaking will take
its place it flew off
departing the recoil
slight and brief to me
who am that branch standing.

     Will be
a form of breast and nodding head
an arrival from the vast mid-west,
where I was on a flat nearly black plain
where evening has
the same color,
empty as that branch filled
with the summer dense locust
and silent under a burden of months
when summer waved away,
a slight recoil,
and snow began to come.

Where sparrows are
the only lifting in the winter
along sentinel fences, among
the rows of stubbles and thin lights
of small towns

Where the light
and all such branches of whipping hickory
start my sadness not violently,
as a yearning to be gone,
but softly, as the remote pleasure of the solstice.

Purple is fashionable twice
at this season (of lifting our heads)
—it is November, and I am with
the shadow of a bird
gone elsewhere now like a shield
across my own hollowed self
a red barn
where the hayropes hang like webs
and the starving sparrows sit
in the lofts
not chirping
for the new wings coming
up to roost.

Ed Dorn, "The Sparrow Sky"